James F. Phillips

James F. Phillips is Professor Emeritus, of the Heilbrunn Department of Population and Family Health, Mailman School of Public Health where he directed research on health systems development in Africa.  Prior to joining the Mailman faculty in 2007, he had Population Council resident assignments in the Philippines, Bangladesh, and Thailand and positions in Nigeria with the US Peace Corps, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and UNICEF. 

At the Mailman School, Dr. Phillips was the founding Director of Advancing Research on Comprehensive Health Systems (ARCHeS), a program for developing evidence based strategies for improving primary health care program functioning.    He was Principal Investigator of the Connect Project of the Ifakara Health Institute in Tanzania, the Ghana Essential Health Intervention Programme (GEHIP), and a project known as Mobile Technology for Community Health (MoTeCH) that developed mobile telephone information systems and tested the maternal and child health impact of cellphone augmented health services in northern Ghana.  He was the founding Principal Investigator of a five year collaborative initiative known as a National Program for Strengthening the Implementation of the Community-based Health Planning and Services (CHPS) Initiative in Ghana: CHPS+, an implementation research partnership of the Ghana Health Service, the University of Ghana Regional Institute for Population Studies, and Columbia University for testing the replication and scale-up of GEHIP in the Volta and Northern Regions of Ghana. 

Dr. Phillips has received professional awards for excellence in implementation research (USAID), partnerships (Government of Ghana), technical support (INDEPTH Network) and mentoring (The Mailman School of Public Health). He has published books on techniques for the statistical evaluation of population programs, the determinants of population program success in Bangladesh, and the demography of South Asia. 

Dr. Phillips was the 2020 recipient of the American Public Health Association Carl S. Schultz Award for Lifetime Achievement in Public Health.

Professor Phillips holds a sociology-demography PhD degree from the University of Michigan, an MS degree in Population Studies from the University of Hawaii, and a Bachelor of Science Degree from the University of Michigan. 

Last updated September 28, 2020