Professor Tim Barraclough is from Bradford, West Yorkshire, and graduated in Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge. 

He completed his DPhil research on the evolution of biodiversity in the Department of Zoology at Oxford. He spent 23 years at Imperial College London’s Silwood Park campus, initially as a post-doctoral researcher and Royal Society University Research Fellow, later as Professor of Evolutionary Biology and deputy head of department responsible for the Silwood Park campus. He moved to Oxford in 2019.