Edward Philip Frank "Ted" Rose TD FGS is an English palaeontologist and geologist, best known as a historian of military aspects of geology.

[citation needed] On completing studies and submitting his thesis for a DPhil (Doctor of Philosophy) degree in 1966, Rose was immediately appointed to an Assistant Lectureship in Geology at Bedford College in the University of London.

Granted tenure and promoted to Lecturer in 1968, he taught palaeontology and stratigraphy in this small department, sharing a heavy teaching and administrative load and additionally being elected to serve for two years as Secretary to the Bedford College Faculty of Science and its subordinate and associated committees, and for two periods as a member of the College's Academic Board.

[citation needed] Echinoids that Rose found when participating in the Oxford Expedition to Cyrenaica 1961 prompted him to return to Libya in 1964 and to develop studies in the Derna District for his doctoral thesis.

[citation needed] Rose was an invited speaker at the Second Symposium on the Geology of Libya, at Tripoli, in 1978; helped lead fieldwork for petroleum consultancies in Libya in 1978 and Oman in 1982; was briefly a visiting lecturer at the University of El Minia, Egypt, in 1985; and under the auspices of the British Council, a visiting lecturer and D-ès-Sc examiner at the University of Tunis, Tunisia, in 1987.

From 1989 he has, as sole or joint author, generated over 40 publications on the geology of this famous ‘Rock’, including the first large-scale printed map of the peninsula and an accompanying field guide, plus papers on topics including the stratigraphy, depositional palaeoenvironments, dolomitisation, brachiopod palaeontology, micropalaeontology, hydrogeology, and tunnelling excavation of the Jurassic ‘Gibraltar Limestone’, aspects of its Quaternary geomorphology and sedimentary cover, and the history of research by British pioneers of Gibraltarian geology.

He completed his CCF service in December 1959, as the senior cadet (Flight Sergeant) leading the school's Royal Air Force section.

[2] On graduation in 1963, he transferred to Q (Queen's Own Oxfordshire Hussars) Battery, 299 Field Regiment Royal Artillery (TA), being promoted Lieutenant in 1963 and to the senior subalterns’ post of Gun Position Officer – being selected to march through London, sword reversed, in the State Funeral of the QOOH Honorary Colonel, Sir Winston Churchill, in 1965.

He notably conducted fieldwork in Thailand (1969, 1970), Malta (1973, 1974), Gibraltar (1973–1975, 1981, 1983, 1987), Hong Kong (1978, 1979, 1981), Cyprus (1983, 1985, 1986), Belize (1984) and Germany (1971, 1977–1982, 1985–1987), and generated some 60 unpublished reports, mostly not in the public domain.

In 1996 he was appointed by the University of London Council to its Military Education Committee (MEC), and subsequently elected Deputy chairman, and finally Chairman of the MEC, prior to resignation in 2009 preparatory to moving home from Amersham near London to Christchurch in Dorset, closer to the region in which his wife of 40 years had her family roots.

His contributions to the success of the conference series and the international significance of his publications were honoured by a dedicatory article in the Vienna post-conference book: Häusler, H. 2011.

He gave the opening keynote address and a second paper at the 13th ICMG, at the University of Padua in Italy in June 2019, and served on the conference's organising committee.

Overall these contribute to an understanding of military aspects of geology from their first perception during Napoleonic times at the turn of the 18th/19th centuries; introduction of geology into the curriculum at all the military officer training establishments in England during the 19th century and influence in the establishment of what is now the British Geological Survey; use by uniformed officers of opposing armies to guide groundwater abstraction and military tunnelling during World War I; and use to guide groundwater abstraction and terrain evaluation (especially by specialist maps to guide rapid construction of temporary airfields and choice of routes for cross-country movement by tracked or wheeled vehicles) during World War II.

Rose was the senior co-editor of and a major contributor to the book Military Aspects of Hydrogeology (published by the Geological Society of London in 2012) and also its companion volume, Military Aspects of Geology: Fortification, Excavation and Terrain Evaluation, published by the Society online in 2018 (to help mark the centenary of the end of the First World War) and in hard copy in January 2019.