Academic Credentials
  • Ph.D., Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), 2026
  • M.A., Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), 2021
  • B.A., Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), 2016
Professional Honors
  • Shepherd Ivory Franz Distinguished Teaching Assistant Award, 2026
  • UCLA NRT MENTOR (Modeling and Understanding Human Behavior) fellowship, 2021
Professional Affiliations
  • Vision Sciences Society (VSS)

Dr. Phillips has expertise in human perception, perceptual psychology, and visual cognition. His work focuses on understanding how people perceive, interpret, recognize, and respond to information in their environment, and how it may contribute to accidents. He applies principles of human factors and perceptual psychology to evaluate human performance and behavior in safety-critical environments.

His areas of expertise include hazard perception, attention, decision-making, perception-response processes, experimental design, visual psychophysics and stimulus development, and computational modeling. Dr. Phillips has also performed assessments of physical environments that include analyses of lighting, glare, and sightline evaluations as they may relate to motor vehicle incidents and pedestrian slip/trip-and fall scenarios. He also has expertise in evaluating the human factors of instructions, warnings and safety communication.

Dr. Phillips earned his Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Computational Cognition program. His doctoral research investigated the encoding and representation of contour shape in human visual perception, combining psychophysical experimentation with computational modeling to better understand how the visual system processes and represents shape information. He also studied functional differences between human visual processing and artificial vision systems, providing insight into the strengths and limitations of machine perception relative to human observers. In addition to his research, Dr. Phillips has also instructed courses at UCLA in sensation and perception, cognitive psychology, and computer programming for behavioral sciences at introductory and advanced levels.