Richard Phillips was born in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1956. He graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1979 and qualified as an Army Ranger, going on to serve as an officer in the US Army. He earned a master's degree in physics from the Naval Postgraduate School in 1989, completing his thesis work at Los Alamos National Laboratory. After working as a research associate at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, he returned to the army to complete his tour of duty. Today he lives with his wife, Carol, in Phoenix, Arizona, where he writes science-fiction thrillers—including the Rho Agenda series (Once Dead, Dead Wrong, Dead Shift), the Rho Agenda Inception series (The Second Shift, Immune, and Wormhole), and the Rho Agenda Assimilation series (The Kasari Nexus, The Altreian Enigma, and The Meridian Ascent).
