Colin Phillips

Colin Phillips grew up in a rural town in eastern England. He attended Oxford University, where he studied Medieval German literature. He then came to the United States on an exchange scholarship to study at Rochester University for a year, where he became more interested in linguistics. He then attended graduate school at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he planned to study semantics.[1]

Philipps researches language acquisition and language processing.[2] In 1997, he was hired at the University of Delaware as an assistant professor.[1] In 2000, he accepted a position as an assistant professor at the University of Maryland, College Park.[3] He was promoted to associate professor in 2002 and full professor in 2008.[4] He became the founding director of the Maryland Language Science Center in 2013.[2]

He has been co-editor of the Annual Review of Linguistics with Mark Y. Liberman since 2021.[4]

The Linguistic Society of America elected him as a fellow in 2018.[4] In 2020, he was elected as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.[2]

During his study-abroad year at Rochester University, he met his future wife, Andrea Zukowski.[3] They have one child.[4] In 2016, he and Zukowski founded College Park parkrun, a series of free running events in their area.[5][6]