Kenneth Libbrecht is a professor of physics at Caltech.

Libbrecht was originally trained as a solar astronomer

Solar astronomy

Solar astronomy is stellar astronomy of the sun.*Timeline of solar astronomy*Solar telescopes*List of solar telescopes*Coronagraph*Helioseismology-Sun size relative to its distance from Proxima Centauri:...

, studying under Robert Dicke

Robert H. Dicke

Robert Henry Dicke was an American physicist who made important contributions to the fields of astrophysics, atomic physics, cosmology and gravity.-Biography:...

 at Princeton

Princeton University

Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....

 and receiving his PhD in 1984. However, much of his recent research has focused on the properties of ice crystals, particularly the structure of snow

Snow

Snow is a form of precipitation within the Earth's atmosphere in the form of crystalline water ice, consisting of a multitude of snowflakes that fall from clouds. Since snow is composed of small ice particles, it is a granular material. It has an open and therefore soft structure, unless packed by...

flakes. In addition to his professional papers, he has published several popular books illustrating the variety of snowflake forms:

• The Snowflake: Winter's Secret Beauty (with Patricia Rasmussen photography)
• Ken Libbrecht's Field Guide to Snowflakes
• The Little Book of Snowflakes
• The Art of the Snowflake: A Photographic Album

He is a physics Professor at Caltech.

Four of Libbrecht's pictures were selected by the United States Postal Service

United States Postal Service

The United States Postal Service is an independent agency of the United States government responsible for providing postal service in the United States...

 as designs for stamps for the 2006 winter holiday season, with a total printing of approximately 3 billion stamps http://www.its.caltech.edu/~atomic/snowcrystals/stamps.htm. Libbrecht won the 2004 National Outdoor Book Award

National Outdoor Book Award

The National Outdoor Book Award was formed in 1997 as a US-based non-profit program which each year honors the best in outdoor writing and publishing. It is housed at Idaho State University and chaired by Ron Watters. Awards are presented in ten categories. The award is announced in early November...

(Nature and the Environment category) for The Snowflake: Winter's Secret Beauty.

Libbrecht is married to Rachel Wing. They have two children.