William D. Phillips received a BS from Juniata College in 1970, and a PhD from MIT in 1976. After two years as a postdoc at MIT, he joined NIST to work on precision electrical measurements and fundamental constants. There, Phillips founded NIST’s laser cooling and trapping group, and later was a founding member of the Joint Quantum Institute, a cooperative research organisation of NIST and the University of Maryland. His research group has developed some of the principal techniques used for laser-cooling and cold-atom experiments in laboratories around the world. Atomic fountain clocks, based on the work of this group, are now the primary standards for world timekeeping. The group also studies quantum information applications of cold atoms.

Phillips is a fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a fellow and honorary member of OPTICA, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, and a corresponding member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences. Phillips was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics 1997 “for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light.”