DEBORAH PHILLIPS, PH.D.

Managing Partner

Deb Phillips is a senior executive with over 25 years of experience in Financial Services, Foundations, Government and Consulting.   Her roles in Executive Management included a focus on cross-functional strategy, operations, human resources, transition, organization development, and decision making. Deb currently works to help people engage in mindful thinking, decision-making, and health, individually and in groups, at all levels in organizational contexts.

Deb most recently served as Executive Vice President of the Atlantic Philanthropies, a $5 billion foundation founded by duty-free creator and entrepreneur Chuck Feeney that focuses on developing the non-profit capacity for social justice advocacy for marginalized groups. As EVP and COO, she was responsible for oversight of the internal operating units, leading the creation of interfacing systems, processes, and departments that were considered essential to Atlantic’s maturation as one of the world’s largest and most respected philanthropies. She created a global Group Services Unit that introduced to the foundation world the concept of a fully integrated infrastructure with the program planning units. She was the key senior management member to oversee board governance and for two years oversaw the Aging Program.

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Deb is Research Faculty and Teaching Fellow in the Psychology department at Harvard.  She is CEO and faculty at the Langer Mindfulness Institute. Her work in Dr. Ellen Langer’s Harvard Research Lab focuses on learning-based cognitive methodologies primarily in organizational and health applications.

Deb received her Ph.D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She currently sits on the Boards of the Partnership for Palliative Care in New York, and Opportunity Project, a New Jersey-based non-profit committed to improving the lives of brain-injured adults.

Deb is based in Short Hills, New Jersey, and Cambridge, Massachusetts.