Stephen Barnett graduated with a BSc in physics from Imperial College London in 1982 and stayed at IC to study for his PhD under the supervision of Peter Knight, graduating in 1985. He held personal Research Fellowships at Imperial College, Harwell and Wolfson College Oxford and at Somerville College Oxford, where he taught Engineering Science. After a year as a Lecturer at Kings College London he moved to Strathclyde in 1991 as a Royal Society of Edinburgh/Scottish Office Education Department research Fellow. He was appointed as a Senior Lecturer and then Reader in 1994 before being promoted to Professor in 1996. He is best known for his work, with David Pegg, on the quantum phase operator, work for which he was awarded the Maxwell Medal and Prize by the Institute of Physics in 1994. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1996 and a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2006. He is currently a recipient of a Royal Society-Wolfson Merit Award and was awarded the James Scott Prize.