James C Phillips is a distinguished computational scientist renowned for his leadership in high-performance molecular dynamics software development. He currently serves as a Senior Research Programmer at the University of Illinois Beckman Institute and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, where he has been instrumental in advancing computational biophysics for over two decades. After completing his doctoral work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign under advisor Klaus Schulten, he began his full-time research career in 1999, focusing on scalable computational approaches for biomolecular simulation. His early participation in the DOE Computational Science Graduate Fellowship program from 1995 to 1999 established the foundation for his future contributions to high-performance scientific computing.
Dr Phillips is the lead developer of NAMD, a groundbreaking parallel molecular dynamics code designed for high-performance simulation of large biomolecular systems, which has fundamentally transformed the field of computational biophysics. NAMD, recipient of both the prestigious 2002 Gordon Bell Award and the 2012 Sidney Fernbach Award, scales beyond 200,000 cores for the largest simulations on high-end parallel platforms, setting new standards for computational efficiency in biomolecular research. His software has been downloaded by over 70,000 researchers worldwide and cited in more than 5,000 scientific publications, making it one of the most widely adopted tools in structural biology and biophysics. Dr Phillips' technical innovations in parallel computing algorithms and force evaluation routines have enabled unprecedented simulations of complex biological systems including the HIV capsid, advancing our understanding of fundamental biomolecular processes.
As a key contributor to the Blue Waters sustained petascale computing system, Dr Phillips continues to push the boundaries of computational capability for the scientific community, ensuring NAMD remains at the forefront of high-performance computing platforms including graphics processors. His collaborative approach has fostered extensive partnerships between computational scientists and biomedical researchers studying the biophysical properties of proteins, lipids, and nucleic acids across numerous institutions worldwide. Through his daily interactions with researchers using NAMD, he maintains a direct connection between software development and scientific discovery, ensuring the tool evolves to meet emerging research needs. Dr Phillips' ongoing work continues to expand the horizons of molecular simulation, enabling increasingly complex biological systems to be studied with computational precision that was previously unimaginable.
