He became a research student in the Radio Astronomy Group of the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, where he completed his PhD in 1967[11] supervised by Martin Ryle.

[2] From 1968 to 1969, he was a Royal Society Exchange Visitor to the Lebedev Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences, where he worked with Vitaly Ginzburg and Yakov Zeldovich.

As of 2017[update] he is the editor-in-chief of the Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society[9] and has authored or co-authored biographies of John E. Baldwin,[12] Vitaly Ginzburg,[13] Brian Pippard,[14] Geoffrey Burbidge[15] and David J. C.

[16] During his career, he supervised numerous PhD students including Jim Dunlop,[3] Stephen Gull,[2] Simon Lilly[4] and John Peacock.

[2] Longair has received numerous awards, including: Since 1975, Longhair has been married to Deborah Howard, an architectural historian.