Hamish comes from a mixed Hong Kong – Scottish family. He grew up in Bedford, UK and studied Natural Sciences at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, specialising in Chemistry. He stayed in Cambridge to complete a PhD in Materials Science with Prof Tony Cheetham in 2012 and did a brief postdoc with the same group. From 2014 to 2016 he worked as an independent ICYS researcher at the National Institute for Materials Science, Japan, during which time he spent six months as a visiting researcher with Prof Andy Cooper at Liverpool University. He returned to the UK to take up a Glasstone Fellowship in Inorganic Chemistry and Extraordinary JRF at the Queen’s College in October 2016 and took up his present Lectureship in the School of Chemistry at the University of Birmingham in 2019.

Hamish received a UKRI EPSRC New Investigator Award in 2021, and was awarded the CCDC Chemical Crystallography Prize for Younger Scientists by the BCA Chemical Crystallography Group in 2022.

Outside of science, Hamish is a husband, father, birdwatcher, runner, musician, table tennis player, mental health advocate and DIY enthusiast. Not necessarily all at the same time, though.