Philip J. Grandinetti was born and grew up in Clarksburg, WV. He received his B.S in chemistry in 1982 and M.S. in physical chemistry in 1984 at West Virginia University. At WVU, he worked on electron paramagnetic resonance studies of phase transitions in ferro- and anti-ferroelectric materials under Professor Nar S. Dalal. He moved to the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, for a Ph.D. in physical chemistry under Professor Jiri Jonas. He developed and applied in-situ high-pressure nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) methodologies to study the dynamics of elastohydrodynamic lubricants and pressure-induced phase transitions in lipids. After finishing his Ph.D., he took a post-doctoral position at the University of California, Berkeley, in the lab of Professor Alex Pines from 1989 to 1993. During this period, he made contributions to a new class of solid-state NMR methods for obtaining high-resolution spectra of half-integer quadrupolar nuclei. He began his career at Ohio State University as an Assistant Professor in 1993, was promoted to Associate Professor in 1999, and full Professor in 2005. His research interests currently focus on magnetic resonance to probe dynamics and structure in disordered and heterogeneous materials.

He received the NSF CAREER award in 1995 and an NSF Creativity Award in 2004. In 2022, he received the Eastern Analytical Symposium Award for Outstanding Achievements in Magnetic Resonance. In 2024, he received a Fulbright Scholar Award as a visiting Professor at the Università degli Studi di Firenze. He was a visiting Professor at the Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon in 1999, a visiting Professor and Le Studium Researcher at the CNRS, Orléans, France in 2005-06, and the Allan Cox Visiting Professor in the School of Earth Sciences, Stanford University in 2009, and a visiting Professor at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland. He served on the Editorial Board of the journal Solid-State Nuclear Magnetic Resonance and was a council member of the International Society of Magnetic Resonance.