Phil Dawson was a founding member of the UKNC and one of its leading members for many years.

He studied for both his BSc in Applied Physics and his PhD at the University of Hull before taking a research position at Philips Research Laboratories in Horsham, West Sussex. It was there that Phil, building on the expertise in laser physics he had acquired at Hull, developed a leading laser spectroscopy laboratory for the study of semiconductor physics.

Apart from a sabbatical year spent at Bell Labs in New Jersey, Phil remained with Philips for more 10 years, before returning to academia after being recruited to the Department of Physics at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology (UMIST). It was whilst at UMIST that he first began working in the then new field of nitride semiconductor physics and started what became a long-standing and fruitful research collaboration with the Department of Material Science and Metallurgy at the University of Cambridge, first with Prof Sir Colin Humphreys and then later also with Prof Rachel Oliver.

Following the merger of UMIST with the Victoria University of Manchester, he joined the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the new University of Manchester, where he was promoted to Professor in 2008 and later becoming Head of the Photon Physics group. Phil retired in 2018 and sadly passed away in 2021.