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 near Utica, NY, where his love of synthetic organic chemistry was born while working on radical cyclizations with Prof. Ian Rosenstein.

Phill graduated from Hamilton College in 2010 with B.A.s in Chemistry and Mathematics, and went on to pursue his Ph.D. in 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-functionalized metal–organic frameworks for CO₂ capture.

In 2018, Phill joined the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Cornell University, where his research is focused broadly at the intersection of organic, inorganic, and materials chemistry. 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. Phill was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2024.

Phill’s independent awards and honors include: 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).