Professor Kenneth Phillips is Scientific Associate at the Natural History Museum in South Kensington, London, and specialises in solar physics and X-ray and ultraviolet spectroscopy. He is author of Guide to the Sun (1992) and has authored over 300 research papers. In 2010, he was awarded the Copernicus Medal of the Polish Academy of Sciences and in 2009, the Gold Medal of the University of Wroclaw, Poland, for collaborative projects with the solar group there. From 2002 to 2005, he held a National Research Council Senior Research Associateship at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and he worked for twenty-five years in the Space Science Department of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Oxfordshire. He has held honorary or visiting professorships at Queen's University, Belfast and University College London.
