From late 1962 onward, he was exposed to early English rock-and-roll at pubs and clubs on the periphery of London and became a lifelong enthusiast of this form of music.

In 1964, he entered Imperial College London to study Pure Geology, play rugby, hockey and cricket, and drink the occasional pint of beer.

McMaster University has a Materials Research Institute[5] that was situated in the Senior Science Building together with the Departments of Geology, Chemistry and Physics.

Frank Hawthorne graduated with a Ph.D. in 1973 and went on to a post-doctoral position with Professor Robert B. Ferguson in the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada.

This was another important step in his development as it exposed him to a wide variety of minerals from granitic pegmatites, particularly through the influence of Petr Černý, and he worked on a wide variety of pegmatite minerals with Černý and Ferguson, returning several times a year to the Materials Research Institute at McMaster University to collect single-crystal X-ray data (at no cost).

At the end of his post-doctoral fellowship, he became a Research Associate, operating the electron microprobe and lecturing for other faculty members when they went on sabbatical leave.

If at the end of this time, the URF was hired as a faculty member by the university, the salary was paid in part by the Federal Government over the next 5 years.

In 1983, Frank Hawthorne received a Major Equipment Grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada for a Single-Crystal Diffractometer and began to build his laboratory and have graduate students.

Traditionally, Mineralogy has been an observational science: Mineralogists describe new minerals, measure the stability fields of known minerals with respect to intensive thermodynamic variables, solve and refine crystal structures, and attempt to develop empirical schemes of organization of this knowledge, and apply these schemes to problems in the Earth and Environmental Sciences.

Using Graph Theory, the topological characteristics of a bond network may be represented as a weighted chromatic digraph of coordination polyhedra and their connectivities.

The elements of the adjacency matrix of this graph form a permutation group that is a subgroup of the symmetric group SN (where N is the number of unique off-diagonal elements of the adjacency matrix), and one may use counting theorems (e.g., Pólya enumeration theorem) to enumerate all edge sets (linkages between polyhedra) that are distinct, thereby counting all distinct local arrangements of coordination polyhedra.

(1) For continuous reactions, thermal expansion and elastic compression must be accompanied by element substitutions that maintain commensurability between different components of the structure.

Extensive experimental work[24] has shown that short-range order is ubiquitous in amphiboles and defines the chemical pathways by which these minerals respond to varying temperature and pressure.

Minerals forming in the shallow crust or at the Earth's surface have cluster, chain, sheet and framework structures in response to the constituent hydrogen.

Systematic examination of these types of crystal-chemical issues using a combination of SREF (Site-occupancy REFinement), SIMS (Secondary-Ion Mass Spectrometry) and HLE (Hydrogen-Line Extraction) showed this not to be the case.