Ben Phillips
Ben Phillips is a Fellow at the African Tech Futures Lab, and the Founder and Principal of South Summit Science LLC. He is an expert in Earth observation, natural resources, and renewable energy, with nearly two decades of experience leading science program development and management for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), The US Department of Energy (DOE), and the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Over the past ten years, Ben led NASA’s geologic mapping efforts to characterize global (EMIT) and US mineral resources (NASA-USGS GEMx). He also led modernization of the NASA Space Geodesy Network, strengthening US capacity in geospatial science and technology. He has served as an expert on multiple interagency and international groups, including the National Volcano Early Warning System Advisory Committee and the UN Committee of Experts on Global Geospatial Information Management. Prior to NASA, Ben was Science Advisor to the DOE Geothermal Technologies Office, where he was a lead architect of the Frontier Observatory for Geothermal Energy (FORGE), the testbed that has catalyzed commercialization of enhanced geothermal systems. He also served as a Program Director in Geophysics at the NSF.
Ben enjoys visiting far-flung places to study the Earth first hand and has conducted fieldwork in Svalbard, Iceland, and across the Americas, including on active volcanoes in Chile, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Hawaii. He earned his BS in Physics from the University of Virginia, and his Ph.D. in Geosciences from Princeton University.
