Philip is an assistant professor at the University of Wageningen, The Netherlands, and a Marie-Curie research fellow at the University of Padova, Italy. He is also connected as advisor to Deltares.

He is specialized on subsidence and relative sea-level rise of coastal-deltaic areas, connecting the fields of geology, hydrogeology, geotechnical engineering, and remote sensing. He has been worked in the Mekong delta on delta subsidence since 2014 within the Dutch-Vietnamese Rise and Fall project in which he aqcuired his PhD.

His research focuses on increasing the fundamental understanding of processes and drivers of deltaic subsidence and developing the numerical capacities to provide better spatial-temporal assessments of current and projections of future deltaic subsidence. He is currently active in research on coastal areas around the world: a.o. the Mekong, Irrawaddy, Po and Mississippi deltas, but also the Manila Bay area, North Java coastline and Lagoon of Venice.

Beside fundamental research, he focuses on impact-orientated research aiming to create awareness and collaborative research uptake, and he is actively engaging with policymakers and NGO's to develop strategies to cope with ongoing land subsidence and accelerated sea-level rise.