Bio: William Coles received his B.A.Sc. from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver in 1963 and a M. Eng. from Mc Gill University in Montreal in 1965. He began his PhD at UC Berkeley in 1965 and completed it at UC San Diego in 1969. He has been a faculty member at UCSD ever since. He has worked as a visiting scientist at Commonweath Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) in Sydney, the Cavendish Lab at Cambridge, the Observatory of Paris at Meudon, the National Center for Radio Astrophysics both in Ootacamund and in Pune, the Solar Terrestrial Environment Lab in Toyokawa, the National Astronomy and Ionosphere Center in Arecibo, and the European Incoherent Scatter Facility in Tromsoe. His honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1976-77, and the Sarojini Damodaran International Fellowship in 2001.

Research: Professor Coles is a radio astronomer and astrophysicist who studies the solar wind, the stream of charged particles flowing out of the Sun. Coles uses data measured directly by spacecraft, and also gathers data from remote-sensing techniques and radio telescopes. The focus of his research is the structure of the solar wind and its origins—where the wind starts and how it is generated. Coles also is an engineer and designer of antennae, knowledgeable in the underlying technologies such as R.F. electronics and digital signal processing. He can also provide perspective on the science of predicting what the solar wind will do, a subject sometimes called space weather.