The
Massachusetts Institute of Technology hired Burrows as a Principal
Research Scientist, based at the
Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (now
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory), from 1989–1998. Burrows was an Advanced Fellow at the
Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council from 1998–2002, as well as Senior Physics Tutor,
Pembroke College, Oxford from 1999–2003. Burrows was Associate Director of the
John Adams Institute for Accelerator Science from 2007–2018, and in 2008 he was an
Erskine Fellow at
Canterbury University, in
New Zealand. In 2014, Burrows advocated for advanced planning for the eventual replacement of the Large Hadron Collider: :But with the LHC due to go out of service before 2040, there is no time to waste in planning its replacement, according to Philip Burrows, a senior research fellow in physics at Oxford University. "Since the gestation time for big accelerators is a couple of decades, we need to start thinking now if we want to have a new machine come online in the late 2030s," he says. From 2017–2019 he was a guest professor of the Director General at CERN. From 2018–2020 he became interim director of Oxford's John Adams Institute for Accelerator Science, and since 2020 he has served as director there. From October 2021–September 2025 he served as an elected general trustee of the IOP. The HL-LHC project's goal is "to increase the performance of the LHC in order to increase the potential for discoveries after 2029... to increase the integrated luminosity by a factor of 10 beyond the LHC's design value." which "plays a central advisory role, providing objective and impartial guidance to the CERN Council on all aspects of CERN's scientific programme". Burrows joined Gianluigi Arduini and Jacqueline Keintzel in comparing seven proposals, "as options for CERN’s next large-scale collider project: CLIC, FCC-ee, FCC-hh, LCF, LEP3,
LHeC and a
muon collider". == Awards and honors ==