Philip received his B.Sc (1966) and Ph.D (1969) from University College London and then spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA with Edmond Fischer (the 1992 Nobel Laureate for Medicine or Physiology).
In 1971 Philip returned to the UK to join the recently founded Department of Biochemistry at the University of Dundee, where he has worked for over 50 years.
Philip was a Royal Society Research Professor from 1984 to 2010, the Founding Director of the MRC-PPU from 1990 to 2012 and Director of the SCottish Institute for ceLL Signalling (SCILLS) from 2008 to 2012.
Philip was the Co-Director from 1998 to 2012 of the Division of Signal Transduction Therapy (DSTT), Europe's largest collaboration between a basic research institution and the pharmaceutical industry, and has been Deputy Director since 2012.
According to Thomson Scientific, Philadelphia, Philip was the world’s second most cited scientist in the field of biology and biochemistry from 1992-2003, and the most cited biochemist from 1999-2009.
Philip has received many prizes for his research discoveries worldwide, including the Colworth (1977) and CIBA (1991) Medals of the Biochemical Society, the Prix van Gysel of the Belgian Royal Academy of Medicine (1992), The Swiss Louis Jeantet Prize (1997), the Pfizer Innovation Award for Europe (1999), the Debrecen Award for Molecular Medicine, Hungary, the Rolf Luft Prize of the Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden (2006), Royal Medals from the Royal Societies of Edinburgh (2004) and London (2008), the Medical Research Council Millennium Medal (2013) and the Albert Einstein World Award of Science (2014).
Philip received the Lifetime Achievement Award from Scotland’s Life Science Industry on March 16th 2023 and the Lifetime Higher Education Award from the Herald newspaper on June 1st 2023.
Philip was knighted by the Queen in 1998 for “Services to Biochemistry”. He was elected a Member of the European Molecular Biology Organisation (EMBO) in 1982, a Foreign Associate of the United States National Academy of Science in 2008 and a Corresponding Member of the Australian Academy of Science in 2014.