Alumni Currents
Staying in touch with our family of graduates
ALUMNUS OF NOTE
Philip Phillips ’79 American Academy of Arts & Sciences adds alumnus to membership By Amy Wilkinson ’04
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“I just thought it was boring,” he recalls. “It hilip Phillips wanted to be a poet. didn’t answer any deep questions to me.” As a teen growing up in College Place, Instead of changing course, however, Phillips stuck with it, using his time at UW as a learnthe Trinidad and Tobago native was ing experience. He abandoned his doctoral fond of the modernist (and heavily initialed) research after receiving his degree in 1982 and went about finding a new area of focus—a pretty movement of poets: T.S. Eliot, E.E. Cummings, rare thing for an academic to do. W.H. Auden. So when he arrived on the Walla “I’m a risk-taker. It’s just the way I’m wired,” says Phillips. “I don’t stick with something that Walla University campus in the fall of 1975, he is going to be a losing proposideclared an English major. tion. I just try to find some way of redirecting.” But things didn’t go as Redirect, he did. After planned. To quote Auden: receiving the prestigious Miller Fellowship, Phillips headed “I thought that love would I took a ride on the to the University of California, last forever: I was wrong.” Berkeley, to pursue post-docskateboard and
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toral studies, and it was there that he began the research that would be the cornerstone of his career. It’s in the area of emergence. Phillips offers a layman’s explanation. “The standard paradigm in science is that you look at the building blocks, you add the building blocks together, and then you understand the phenomenon that you are looking at. But in some cases, it’s not. There are missing steps, where it seems as if you put things together and you get more than you bargained for. And that is emergence. The whole is bigger than the sum of the parts.” According to Phillips, it is in “finding the organizing principle that deep physics lurks.” The area that he felt typified this best was solid-state physics, so that became his area of research at Berkeley. After two years there, he landed his first teaching job at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. The school was keen to bring on chemists who also had subject matter knowledge in physics, and Phillips fit the
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Westwind Summer 2020
PHOTO: L. BRIAN STAUFFER, UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN
completely wiped out … and that changed the course of all the courses that I took.”
To be sure, Phillips remains an ardent fan of poetry, but admits: “I just didn’t have the talent to be a writer.” At the time, he also felt dubious about the math class in which he was enrolled—calculus just wasn’t challenging. And so, in the third quarter of his freshman year, he marched down to the registrar’s office to drop math from his schedule and add Western Civilization and tennis. But a funny thing happened on the way to the Ad Building. “I saw a kid riding a skateboard,” he recalls. “I took a ride on the skateboard and completely wiped out, spraining my ankle, and it required a cast for eight weeks. I never made it to the registrar’s office, and that changed the course of all the courses that I took.” Indeed, Phillips would eventually declare a double major in math and chemistry. “I didn’t know that I wanted to be a scientist until I took chemistry in my sophomore year from Dr. Chinn,” Phillips says. “The fact that the periodic table had a structure behind it—it wasn’t random—struck me as being awfully amazing, and it was in that class that I decided I have to be a scientist.” Phillips graduated from WWU in 1979 and went straight into doctoral studies at the University of Washington, where he developed methods to calculate phosphorescence lifetimes in molecules. Another development? The work didn’t excite him.
