Stellaris: People of the Stars

Les Johnson is a NASA physicist and author. By day, he serves as the Deputy Manager for the Advanced Concepts Office at the NASA George C. Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. In the early 2000s, he was NASA’s Manager for Interstellar Propulsion Research and later managed the In-Space Propulsion Technology Project. He was technical consultant for the movie Lost in Space and has appeared on the Discovery Channel series, Physics of the Impossible in the “How to Build a Starship” episode. He has also appeared in three episodes of the Science Channel series Exodus Earth. He is the author of novel Back to the Moon, coauthored with Travis S. Taylor, and the coeditor of the science/science fiction collection Going Interstellar.

Robert E. Hampson, Ph.D., turns science fiction into science in his day job, and puts the science into science fiction in his spare time. He has consulted for more than a dozen SF writers, assisting in the (fictional) creation of future medicine, brain computer interfaces, unusual diseases, alien intelligence, novel brain diseases (and the medical nanites to cure them), exotic toxins, and brain effects of a zombie virus. His science writing ranges from fictional depiction of real science and the mysteries of the brain to surviving the Apocalypse or living in space. His recent forays into short fiction have appeared in the US Army Small Wars Journal (TRADOC Mad Science Writing Contest), Science Fiction by Scientists (Springer), Black Tide Rising anthologies (Baen), and Four Horsemen Universe (Chris Kennedy Publishing). Some of his prior fiction and nonfiction appeared under the pseudonym: Tedd Roberts.

Dr. Hampson is a professor of physiology / pharmacology and neurology with over 35 years' experience in animal neuroscience and human neurology. His professional work includes more than 100 peer-reviewed research articles ranging from the pharmacology of memory to the effects of radiation on the brain — and most recently, the first report of a "neural prosthetic" to restore human memory using the brain's own neural codes. He is a member of the SIGMA Forum and the Science and Entertainment Exchange — a service of the National Academy of Sciences.

He is married with two grown sons and lives outside Winston-Salem, North Carolina.