Vernon Cooray (IEEE Fellow) is a senior professor at the department of electrical engineering, Uppsala University. Uppsala University. From 1999 – 2003 he was the head of the Division for Electricity. He has supervised 28 Ph.D. students both from Sweden, Sri Lanka, Columbia and Malaysia. He has authored and co-authored about 380 scientific papers. He is the editor of four books, The lightning Flash (2003), Lightning Protection (2009), and Lightning Electromagnetics (2012), The Lightning Flash (second and expanded edition, 2014) published by the Institution of Engineering and Technology (former IEE), London, UK. He is also the author of the book, Introduction to Lightning, published by Springer in 2014. For this book, he received the best book award from the association of librarians in 2015. Professor Vernon Cooray is the president of ICLP and the recipient of the Berger award for his contributions to lightning research. In 2015 he was awarded a D.Sc. degree from the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka, for his contributions to lightning research.