Ian Hamley (born 1965) is a British academic who is the Diamond Professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Reading.

He is a soft matter scientist[1] and physical chemist with research expertise in self-assembling molecules including polymers, peptides[2] and other biomolecules.

After postdoctoral research at AMOLF (FOM Institute for Atomic and Molecular Physics, Amsterdam) and University of Minnesota, Hamley was appointed as lecturer in Physics at the University of Durham in 1993 where he worked until 1995.

He moved to the Department of Chemistry at the University of Leeds in 1995 and was promoted to become Professor of Polymer Materials and Director of the Centre for Self-Organising Molecular Systems in 2004.

Hamley was a Royal Society-Woolfson Research Merit Award Holder 2011–2016 and won the RSC Peter Day award for Materials Chemistry in 2016[10] and the MacroGroup UK Medal for Contribution to UK Polymer Science in 2016.