Kenneth J. H. Phillips

Kenneth Phillips is Scientific Associate at the Natural History Museum (Earth Sciences) in London, and holds a Visiting Professorship (University College London) and Honorary Professorship (Queen's University Belfast). He is the author of "Guide to the Sun" (CUP) and one of 3 authors of "Ultraviolet and X-ray Spectroscopy of the Solar Atmosphere" (CUP). He was educated at Ashford County Grammar School then gained BSc and PhD degrees at University College London, after which he took postdoctoral positions in solar physics at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (Greenbelt, Maryland, USA) and the University of Hawaii. He was at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory's Space Science Department between 1977 and 2002, then took up a US National Research Council Senior Research Associateship at Goddard (2002-2005) to work on the RHESSI spacecraft project with Brian Dennis and others. His research interests include solar physics and X-ray and ultraviolet spectroscopy, as well as Sun-like stars. He has lectured widely on these topics. He and a research team from Belfast and the University of Wroclaw, Poland, were the subject of a BBC documentary on the 2001 total solar eclipse in Zambia. He has close links with NASA Goddard and with Polish solar astronomers at the University of Wroclaw in Poland and the Polish Academy of Sciences, notably Professors Pawel Rudawy and Janusz Sylwester. The co-operation over several years led to the award first of the Gold Medal of Wroclaw University (Sept. 2009) followed by the Copernicus Medal of the Polish Academy of Sciences at the Staszicz Palace in Warsaw (see pictures). Minor planet 13991 Kenphillips is named after him. Among his more than 200 publications is a Scientific American article on solar coronal heating (with Dr Bhola Dwivedi), published in the June 2001 issue of the magazine, which gained the 2004 Popular Writing Award on Solar Physics from the American Astronomical Society. Ken takes an active interest in fair representation of women and minorities in astronomy, serving on the RAS Women in Astronomy Committee (1998-2002). His hobbies include running, music and drama, and reading. The bookshelves in his living room groan under the weight of nearly 500 novels and non-fiction books he's read over the years.