William Daniel Phillips was born on November 5, 1948, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. He grew up in Camp Hill, outside Harrisburg, and attended Juniata College. Phillips was awarded his B.S. degree from Juniata in 1970. He then continued his studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), from which he earned a Ph.D. in physics in 1976. He then spent two years as a postdoctoral Chaim Weizmann Fellow at MIT. In 1978, Phillips accepted an appointment as a physicist at NIST, a post he retained for the next two decades.

Phillips has been interested in the problem of cooling and trapping atoms since his years at MIT. This line is of growing interest among physicists because it provides a way of studying the structure and properties of individual molecules and atoms. Traditionally, scientists have been able to study only the bulk properties of matter, that is, the average properties of, at best...