After Merchant Taylors' School, Northwood (1951–57) his first degree was in physics from Imperial College London (1960) and his PhD was in meteorological physics from Churchill College Cambridge (1964), supervised by Dr T.W.
[1] He began his career at the University of Southampton (1966-1979) and then moved to the British Antarctic Survey (1979-1990), where he became director of physical science.
He was a visiting senior research fellow at the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, University of Bath (2006-2016).
He has published around 170 papers in the refereed literature,[2] edited a significant encyclopedia,[3] and co-authored two books on space research.
[7] On 16 November 2018 a special symposium[8] was held in Bath, UK, to mark Rycroft's 80th birthday, with a biographical tribute paper published in May 2020.