David Phillips grew up in Nyasaland, now Malawi. He schooled in England at Cambridge and Warwick Universities and gained a PhD at Bradford related to technology and development, where he also taught. He started his career in the private sector at Unilever and IBM. He was on the World Bank staff from 1987 to 2001 working in Africa and the former Soviet Union and then joined a British consulting firm to run the US office, working variously in Africa, the Caribbean and East Europe/ Russia. He previously wrote a book on the reform of the World Bank (Cambridge University Press 2009). He lives with his family in Arlington VA.