Tom Philp has been an editorial board member at The Sacramento Bee since 1997. An associate editor, he writes editorials, columns and Sunday Forum section articles about regional planning, water use issues, agriculture, forestry, energy, health care and telecommunications.

Before joining the editorial board, Philp was a staff writer in The Bee's newsroom for five years, covering a variety of subjects, including medicine. He has won a number of awards, including the 1992 Best of the West first place for deadline writing about a high school shooting in a nearby community and the 1994 American Association of University Professors top prize for his series detailing the finances of college athletics. Philp received the 2000 California Newspaper Publishers Association Better Newspapers first place award for Editorial Comment. In 2001 he earned the Bay Institute of San Francisco's Harold Gilliam Award for Excellence in Environmental Reporting. In 2004 his editorial series on questionable spending inside California water districts won the Scripps Howard Foundation's Walker Stone award, the Sigma Delta Chi Award and the National Headliner Award for editorial writing.

Philp is a graduate of Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. He lives in Carmichael, California, with wife and their children, Max and Charlotte.