Dr. Compeau is the Assistant Department Head and an Associate Teaching Professor in the Computational Biology Department. He directs the undergraduate program and serves as an assistant director for the MS in Computational Biology program, and co-founded (with Josh Kangas) the PreCollege Program in Computational Biology, the first educational program in computational biology for high school students in the United States. 

Dr. Compeau also teaches a variety of courses, and he is passionate about how online and offline educational materials can inform and enrich each other as we build an effective 21st Century classroom. He completed a Ph.D. in mathematics at UC San Diego, where he co-founded Rosalind, a platform for learning computational biology and algorithms through problem solving that has reached over 300,000 users. Phillip also helped lead the development of the first massive open online course (MOOC) in computational biology in 2013, which has since grown into the Bioinformatics Specialization on Coursera. He is the co-author (with Pavel Pevzner) of Bioinformatics Algorithms: An Active Learning Approach, a bestselling textbook in computational biology that has been adopted by 200 instructors in over 40 countries. And he is the founder of the Biological Modeling open online course project.