Kevin Fong

Kevin Fong is an anaesthetist and lecturer in physiology, who has become known to many for his extensive television and radio appearances on the BBC and elsewhere. He has notably become a leading expert on space and extreme environment medicine, presenting several documentaries and delivering the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures on this pioneering subject.

Fong is a Consultant Anaesthetist at UCL Hospitals, being the Anaesthetic Lead for Major Incident Planning and the Patient Emergency Response Team. He teaches at University College London, where he holds the position of Honorary Senior Lecturer in Physiology, and runs a course for undergraduates in Extreme Environment Physiology. He has a particular interest in space medicine, having studied astrophysics himself, and has founded the Centre for Altitude, Space and Extreme Environment Medicine at UCL. He has worked with NASA’s Human Adaptation and Countermeasures Office at Houston’s Johnson Space Center.

Over almost two decades, Fong has become a familiar presence on television and radio, presenting five episodes of long-running BBC documentary series Horizon, Channel 4’s Superhumans, and an episode of Frontiers on Radio 4. He has written and presented the BBC documentary Space Shuttle: The Final Mission, and presented the podcast 13 Minutes to the Moon for the BBC World Service. In 2015, Fong delivered that year’s Royal Institution Christmas Lecture series, on the subject ‘How to survive in space’. He has been featured as a resident scientist on ITV’s It’s Not Rocket Science, regularly appears on the BBC World Service’s Health Check, appeared in the documentary Operation Gold Rush with Dan Snow, and has been a guest on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs.

Fong has received the Wellcome Trust Public Engagement Fellowship, and was appointed an OBE in 2019 for services to medicine and healthcare.