William Phillips

William Phillips is a Nobel-prize winning physicist who was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania on November 5, 1948. In 1959, Phillips graduated summa cum laude from Juniata College -- a small school in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, where both his father and mother had gone before him. Phillips went on to earn his Physics PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Early on in his career Phillips focused on the magnetic properties of protons in water, but he is best known for his work on laser cooling. Along with Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and Steven Chu, Phillips helped develop the techniques of laser cooling, in which lasers are used to slow down and trap atoms, bringing them down to extremely cold temperatures. In 1997 he won the Nobel Prize in Physics (together with Cohen-Tannoudji and Chu) for this work.

Phillips works currently at the National Institutes of Standards and Technology, and also holds a professorship of physics at University of Maryland, College Park. An important part of his church community, Phillips often emphasizes that there is no contradiction in being a scientist and a religious person at the same time. Phillips also commits a great deal of time to lecturing and demonstrating about physics to lay audiences.

Additional resources:

William Phillips’s autobiography on the Nobel Prize site http://nobelprize.org/physics/laureates/1997/phillips-autobio.html