[1][2][3] Phillips was awarded a postdoctoral Miller Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley and became interested in many-body phenomena in disordered systems.
In 1984, he joined the faculty at the Chemistry Department at Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an Associate Professor, where he worked on Anderson localization.
His research is in theoretical solid-state physics, focusing on understanding electron transport and magnetism in disordered and strongly correlated systems.
In 2005, he became a College of Engineering Bliss Faculty Scholar at the University of Illinois, and was a National Science Foundation American Competitiveness and Innovation Fellow from 2009-2011.
[9] Philips is the author of Advanced Solid State Physics, a textbook that describes modern advanced-level solid state physics at the graduate level, with a focus on cutting-edge topics such as topological insulators, strongly correlated electrons, and electron transport, published by Cambridge University Press in 2012.