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Alumnus of note: Philip Phillips '79
American Academy of Arts & Sciences adds alumnus to membership
By Amy Wilkinson ’04
Philip Phillips wanted to be a poet. As a teen growing up in College Place, the Trinidad and Tobego native was fond of the modernist (and heavily initialed) movement of poets: T.S. Eliot, E.E. Cummings, and W.H. Auden. So when he arrived on the Walla Walla University campus in the fall of 1975, he declared an English major. But things didn't go as planned. To quote Auden: "I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong."
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.
“I just thought it was boring,” he recalls. “It didn’t answer any deep questions to me.”
Instead of changing course, however, Phillips stuck with it, using his time at UW as a learning experience. He abandoned his doctoral research after receiving his degree in 1982 and went about finding a new area of focus—a pretty rare thing for an academic to do.
“I’m a risk-taker. It’s just the way I’m wired,” says Phillips. “I don’t stick with something that is going to be a losing proposition. I just try to find some way of redirecting.”
Redirect, he did. After receiving the prestigious Miller Fellowship, Phillips headed to the University of California, Berkeley, to pursue post-doctoral 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 bill. Perhaps a little too well. As Phillips’ research continued to evolve, he became more and more physics-leaning. He never received tenure in the chemistry department and ultimately left for a job in the physics department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he’s taught for the past 27 years.
“I never dreamed of getting a job at the physics department at Illinois—it’s number one in the field that I’m in,” says Phillips.
Over the past two-plus decades at U of I, Phillips’ research has focused on superconductivity, and why some materials superconduct at higher temperatures than previously thought. Ultimately, if Phillips’ research bears out, it could fundamentally change the way electricity and magnetism are understood. If that sounds like a big deal, it is.
Clearly, Phillips is operating at the top of the field, and in April, he received a new accolade to add to his already impressive résumé—membership in The American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Founded in 1780 by John Adams, John Hancock, and others, the American Academy recognizes the achievements of leaders from across a number of disciplines, bringing them together in order to further new ideas and address issues of global importance.
Phillips, who had no idea he had been nominated for the honor and still isn’t 100 percent sure who nominated him, was on a Zoom call when he got the email.
“This person never emails me, and it said, ‘Congratulations.’ And I go, ‘Let me see if that’s really correct,’” Phillips recalls. “It was a shock, because I wasn’t expecting it.”
The awards luncheon honoring the American Academy’s new members was postponed due to COVID-19, but Phillips is excited to eventually be in the same room with his fellow 275 inductees, including singer-songwriter Joan Baez and former Attorney General of the United States Eric Holder.
When not in the physics lab, Phillips partakes in an equally impressive hobby: opera singing. “That’s the sort of thing you can do at a U of Illinois—you can take lessons from people who are quite renowned,” he says. “I’ve been in a couple of the operas here, so voice is something I take very seriously. I practice it a few hours a day.”
Phillips also enjoys playing tennis and spending time with his wife, Brett Kaplan, a comparative literature professor at U of I, and their three children, Anya (17), Melia (16), and Orestes (15).
As for what his future holds, Phillips says he would like to continue working and investigating the big questions until he’s at least 80 years old. “I’ve always said, ‘If I don’t have any more ideas, I’ll quit.”
For an academic like Phillips, that certainly won’t happen anytime soon.
