Tony McDonnell is currently a Professor of Planetary and Space Science at The Open University, United Kingdom. Together with Peter Tsou and Don Brownlee, he was the first to demonstrate the intact capture of space particulates in aerogel, the baseline technique used in STARDUST. He has participated in several key space initiatives including the Apollo lunar sample analysis, the Giotto Mission to Comet Halley, Ulysses, Eureka and Space Shuttle Payloads. As founding member of ESA's Rosetta Comet Mission team, he developed detectors to study the cometary environment, currently selected to fly on the Italian GIADA instrument. Author of Cosmic Dust, a milestone in Solar System Cosmic Dust Research, he has been an active member of COSPAR and the International Astronomical Union; in addition to his work with NASA and ESA, he participated in Mars 96 with the Vernadsky Institute, Moscow.