ACHS Staff

Nathan Phillips, BM, MM, PhD

Nathan Phillips-2-opt

Chief Information Officer

Nathan comes to ACHS from Marylhurst University, where he was CIO for over two years and before that the IT director of Academic and Support Services.

His background is diverse, with positions as a lead trainer at Apple Inc. and faculty positions at leading universities including the University of Hong Kong, Keio University, University of California at San Diego, and the University of Portland.

Nathan earned a Ph.D. from UCSD, Masters degrees at Johns Hopkins, and undergraduate work at Northwestern University. Before his career in information technology management, Nathan did research in music technology, specializing in live digital signal processing of sound signals.

As an educator, he has delivered over 10,000 hours of classroom, workshop training, and individual training to over 3,500 participants. A good portion of that training was based on his own work as an Instructional Designer, on a large variety of subjects including Customer Service, Leadership, Technology skills, and academic coursework in Music, English, Fine Arts, and Instructional Design.

Dr. Phillips is also an active participant with various groups including having served as co-leader of the CIO group of the Oregon Alliance for Independent Colleges and Universities, volunteer work with Educause, and as faculty secretary for three years at Marylhurst University.

Nathan loves to travel and has been to all 50 States and 7 countries. He says “I hope to get to all the continents! I test out my managerial and instructional design ideas on my daughters–it doesn’t always go well! Luckily, I have a great sense of humor. I do not test out my ideas on my wife, which may be why I’m still married!”

Despite a busy schedule, he also finds a little time for his musicianship skills and occasionally performs on viola (he used to play professionally in the Hong Kong Sinfonietta).  And, like many Portlanders, he loves to cook and has been working on making the perfect bananas foster for over 20 years (he says one of the secrets is that you must use authentic Jamaican white rum).