Rate My Professor Rebecca Phillipson

Rebecca Phillipson is an Assistant Professor of Physics at Villanova University, where she leads the Phillipson High-Energy Astrophysics Group. She earned her Ph.D. in Physics from Drexel University in 2020, with a dissertation titled 'Investigating Nonlinear Time Variability of Accretion Disks around Compact Objects.' Her earlier degrees include an M.S. in Physics from Drexel University in 2017, a B.S. in Physics from Colorado State University in 2015, and a B.A. in Astronomy from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2013. Prior to her current position, Phillipson held an NSF Mathematical and Physical Sciences Ascend Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Washington eScience Institute from 2021 to 2024, sponsored by Dr. Joey Neilsen of Villanova University, and served as a Postdoctoral Scholar in the University of Washington Department of Astronomy from 2020 to 2021. During her graduate studies at Drexel, she was a NASA Harriett G. Jenkins Graduate Research Fellow from 2016 to 2020. She has teaching experience, including instructing PHYS 2200: Physics 1 for Engineers at Villanova in Spring 2023, and extensive undergraduate mentorship.

Phillipson's research specializes in time domain astrophysics, focusing on the timing variability of accreting black holes and neutron stars. She analyzes data from X-ray satellites such as RXTE, Swift, MAXI, and optical surveys including Kepler, TESS, ZTF, and preparations for LSST. Her methods incorporate nonlinear dynamics, chaos theory, recurrence analysis, machine learning, Bayesian statistics, and radiation-hydrodynamic simulations, often outperforming traditional Fourier techniques for irregular time series. Key publications include 'Correlated Spectral and Recurrence Variations of Cygnus X-1' (Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2024, with E.M. Broadbent), 'Investigating Non-linear and Stochastic Hard X-ray Variability of Active Galactic Nuclei' (MNRAS, 2022), 'Complex Variability of Kepler AGN Revealed by Recurrence Analysis' (MNRAS, 2020), and 'The Chaotic Long-term X-ray Variability of 4U 1705-44' (MNRAS, 2018). Major awards encompass the NSF MPS-Ascend Fellowship, valued at $300,000 over three years, and the NASA Harriett G. Jenkins Fellowship, $220,000 over four years. She serves on the American Astronomical Society's Committee on Astronomy and Public Policy (2024-2026), conducts peer reviews for NuSTAR, Chandra, NICER, and NASA ADAP proposals, and participates in collaborations such as ZTF, STROBE-X, and Scialog for early LSST science. Phillipson has delivered invited talks, including a colloquium at Carnegie Science on the topology of chaos in accreting objects and a plenary at the Transient and Variable Universe conference in 2023.