Dr Phil Adsley was brought up in South Oxfordshire, England close to the Harwell nuclear site which sparked an interest in nuclear science. He read Physical Natural Sciences as an undergraduate at Peterhouse, the oldest constituent college at the University of Cambridge before completing a PhD in Experimental Nuclear Astrophysics at the University of York. Following this, he was a Stellenbosch University postdoctoral researcher at iThemba LABS, the South African National Nuclear-Physics Laboratory in Cape Town, South Africa and at the Institut Joliot-Curie, in Orsay, Paris, France. He returned to South Africa in 2019 as a Claude Leon Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the University of the Witwatersrand, again based at iThemba LABS. In August 2021, he started a position as an Assistant Professor at Texas A&M University in the Department of Physics & Astronomy, and the Cyclotron Institute. In 2023, he received the US Department of Energy Early Career Award for his research on how nuclei respond to dipole radiation and how this can teach us about nuclear reactions in stars, reactors and people. His other research interests include understanding thermonuclear explosions in space and how elements are produced in neutron-capture reactions in different kinds of star, as well as detector and target fabrication to support nuclear-science research.