Philip J. Cook is ITT/Sanford Professor of Public Policy and professor of economics and sociology at Duke University. He served as director and chair of Duke’s Sanford Institute of Public Policy from 1985–89, and again from 1997–99. Cook is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, an honorary Fellow in the American Society of Criminology, and a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences.

He has served as consultant to the US Department of Justice (Criminal Division) and to the US Department of Treasury (Enforcement Division). He has served in a variety of capacities with the National Academy of Sciences, including on expert panels addressing alcohol-abuse prevention, violence, school shootings, underage drinking, the deterrent effect of the death penalty, and proactive policing. He served as vice chair of the National Research Council’s Committee on Law and Justice.

Cook's primary focus at the moment is the economics of crime. He is codirector of the NBER Work Group on the Economics of Crime, and coeditor of a NBER volume on crime prevention. His other research concerns the costs and consequences of the widespread availability of guns, and what might be done about it. He has written extensively on this topic, including in Gun Violence: The Real Costs (with Jens Ludwig; Oxford University Press, 2000), and The Gun Debate (with Kristin A. Goss; Oxford University Press 2014).