Hagan Bayley received his B.A. in Chemistry from the University of Oxford. He carried out graduate work under the supervision of Professor Jeremy Knowles at Harvard University, receiving a Ph.D. in Chemistry. His postdoctoral training was with Professor Gobind Khorana at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He then went on to faculty positions at Columbia University, the Worcester Foundation and Texas A&M University. He joined the University of Oxford as the Professor of Chemical Biology in 2003 and is a Fellow of Hertford College.

A major interest of his laboratory is the development of engineered protein nanopores for stochastic detection, including single-molecule covalent chemistry and ultrarapid biopolymer sequencing.

Recently, the Bayley lab has developed techniques for the fabrication of 3D tissues, both living and synthetic.

In 2005, Professor Bayley founded Oxford Nanopore, which has manufactured the portable MinION and other DNA/RNA sequencers.

Professor Bayley was the 2009 Chemistry World Entrepreneur of the Year.
In 2011, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.
In 2012 he was awarded the Royal Society of Chemistry's Interdisciplinary Prize.
In 2017 the Menelaus Medal of the Learned Society of Wales
In 2018, Professor Bayley held the Kavli Chair at the Delft University of Technology and he is currently a Program Director of the Oxford Martin School.
In 2019 the Mullard Award of the Royal Society.