Phillip J. Milner
Associate Professor
Office: Baker Lab 328
Email: pjm347@cornell.edu
Phone: (607) 255-6295
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About Phill:

Phill was born a stone’s throw from Ithaca in Towanda, PA and grew up near Rochester, NY. Phill attended Hamilton College, where his love of synthetic organic chemistry was born while working on radical cyclization reactions with Prof. Ian Rosenstein.

Phill graduated from Hamilton College in 2010 (B.A. Chemistry, Mathematics), and went on to pursue his PhD in Organic Chemistry with Prof. Stephen Buchwald at MIT. There, Phill developed Pd-catalyzed fluorination and ¹¹C-cyanation reactions of (hetero)aryl halides. Upon graduating from MIT in 2015, Phill joined the group of Prof. Jeffrey Long at the University of California, Berkeley, where he designed amine-based materials for CO₂ capture.

In 2018, Phill joined the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Cornell University. Phill was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2024. Phill’s independent awards and honors include the ACS Award in Pure Chemistry (2026), Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award (2023), NSF CAREER Award (2021), Robert A. and Donna B. Paul Award for Excellence in Advising (2021), Scialog Fellowship (2020), Department of Energy Early Career Award (2020), and NIH Maximizing Investigator’s Research Award (2020).

Phill is a member of the Cornell Center for Materials Research (CCMR) and the Cornell Energy Systems Institute (CESI), a Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability Faculty Fellow, and a field member in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering.