The Philip J. Stephens Award was established in 2014 by the International Steering Committee of the conference series on Vibrational Optical Activity (VOA) at the VOA-4 meeting in Baoding, China. The award was presented for the first time at the VOA-5 conference in Antwerp, Belgium in September 2016 and honors Philip J. Stephens as a leading founder of the VOA field with particular influence on vibrational circular dichroism (VCD) measurement and theory, who sadly declined and passed away at the height of his of scientific career as VCD, and its companion technique Raman optical activity (ROA), were gaining substantially greater world-wide awareness and application.