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, where he writes science-fiction thrillers and fantasy—including The Rho Agenda series (The Second Ship, Immune, and Wormhole), The Rho Agenda Inception series (Once Dead, Dead Wrong, and Dead Shift), and The Rho Agenda Assimilation series (The Kasari Nexus, The Altreian Enigma, and The Meridian Ascent). He is also the author of Mark of Fire and Prophecy’s Daughter, the first two books in the epic Endarian Prophecy fantasy novels.