Robert Hadfield leads a growing research group at Heriot-Watt University (Edinburgh, Scotland), focusing on the development and applications of superconducting single-photon detectors. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge, UK in 2003. He spent four years as a postdoctoral guest researcher at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST; Boulder, CO). He joined Heriot-Watt in January 2007 as a Royal Society University Research Fellow and was promoted to Reader in Physics in October 2009. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics.