Graham Smith read Physics at the University of Oxford 1988-1991, and was the first member of his family to attend university. In 1991 he returned to his native Yorkshire to join Arthur Andersen, with whom he qualified as a Chartered Accountant in 1994, and spent most of the 1990s working in their Business Consulting practice.
After returning to academia in 1999, he graduated from Durham University with a PhD in Astrophysics in 2002, before spending three years as a Postdoctoral Scholar at the California Institute of Technology. He returned to the UK in 2005 as a Royal Society University Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham, and is now a Professor in Birmingham’s School of Physics and Astronomy.
Graham received the Royal Astronomical Society’s Fowler Award in 2007, was co-recipient of the Astronomical Society of Japan’s Excellent Paper Award in 2012, and was awarded a Royal Society Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowship in 2021.
He has also held honorary faculty positions at the California Institute of Technology (2005-2008) and the University of Bradford’s School of Management (1994-1996).