Alistair “Ben” Phillips '86MA: A Cornerstone of Community, a Career of Healing

When Alistair “Ben” Phillips ’86MA arrived at Moravian Academy as a fifth grader, he encountered a school culture shaped by both high expectations and personal connection. He remembers a Head of School who greeted every student with a handshake each morning and expected each student to meet his eyes in return.

It was a small ritual, but a meaningful one: an expectation to be present, to acknowledge another person, and to understand oneself as part of a community.

More than four decades later, Ben is one of the nation’s leading congenital heart surgeons. His career has taken him into operating rooms around the world, including more than 40 medical missions across Latin America, Africa, and Asia. As Surgical Team Captain for Heart Care International, his work is animated by a question that is both medical and deeply human: How do we narrow the distance between the healthcare some people receive and the healthcare every person deserves?

For Ben, the answer begins much as his education did, with attention, discipline, and a belief in what becomes possible when people work together with purpose.

Ben speaks candidly about his early years as a student. Academics did not always come easily; he did not learn to read until sixth grade. What he found at Moravian Academy, however, were teachers willing to look closely enough to recognize his strengths and create opportunities for them to emerge.

He remembers Mrs. Dorothy Burcaw’s Middle School science class, where a project mapping the systems of the human body, and a particularly meticulous frog dissection, offered an early glimpse of the curiosity and precision that would eventually lead him toward medicine.

Other lessons were less obviously connected to his future profession, but no less enduring. Ben still recalls Dr. Tom Bros’s insistence that a stapled paper be fastened at precisely 45 degrees, positioned to make full use of the staple’s strength. What might have seemed like an exacting classroom expectation became, over time, something closer to a philosophy.

“It’s a process. You have to do things with purpose,” Ben says.

Decades later, he still thinks about that lesson in operating rooms thousands of miles from Moravian Academy.

He also credits the breadth of his Moravian education with shaping the way he understands collaboration. Students were expected to participate: to play sports, learn an instrument, join teams, and contribute even when they were not the most naturally gifted person in the room. The value was not simply in developing a particular skill, it was in learning how individual effort contributes to something larger.

“Everybody has a role to play,” he says.

That understanding, the ability to recognize one’s role, value the expertise of others, and work toward a shared purpose, would become fundamental to his life in medicine.

That instinct followed Ben to Johns Hopkins University, where a college roommate encouraged him to shift his studies from computer science to biomedical engineering and pre-med, and later through cardiac surgical training at Weill Cornell and Columbia.

It has become especially important in his work with Heart Care International, which he joined in 2005.

For Ben, a successful medical mission is not measured solely by the number of surgeries completed during a visit. The larger objective is to cultivate the knowledge, infrastructure, and confidence that allow local medical teams to provide increasingly sophisticated care long after a visiting surgical team has returned home.

That philosophy is evident in Heart Care International’s work in Cambodia. Beginning in the fall of 2025, Ben and his colleagues held monthly training lectures for local physicians and technicians, steadily preparing for their first surgical mission in February 2026. During that visit, the team completed seven successful surgeries in four days, working alongside 45 hospital staff members who volunteered their own weekend to learn with the visiting team.

Ben estimates that developing a fully self-sustaining congenital heart surgery program may take a decade. The investment is significant because its effects extend far beyond a single specialty.

“If you teach a hospital how to do congenital heart surgery well, you improve anesthesia, you improve the ICU, you improve nursing across the board,” he says. “You raise all boats.”

It is an approach grounded not in arriving with all the answers, but in partnership: sharing knowledge, developing capacity, and trusting that lasting change is built deliberately, person by person and system by system.

Ben returned to Moravian Academy this year to speak at Chapel, bringing his journey back to the community where so many of those habits first took shape.

Asked what he might say to the fifth grader he once was—the student still discovering his strengths and beginning to understand what he could contribute—his answer came quickly:

“I’d be amazed.”

The significance, for Ben, is not found in any single accomplishment. It is in the distance a person can travel when a community recognizes potential before its outcome is known; when teachers pair expectation with encouragement; and when curiosity is given the space to become purpose.

His journey from a Moravian Academy classroom to operating rooms around the world offers a compelling expression of what education can make possible. The lessons that endure are not always the ones we recognize as consequential when we first encounter them. Sometimes they begin with a science project, a place on a team, a carefully positioned staple, or a handshake at the door.

Over time, those experiences become habits: to pay attention, to pursue excellence with purpose, to recognize the contributions of others, and to understand that our gifts matter most when they are placed in service to something larger than ourselves.