Brian Elliott Hayden FRSC (born July 1954) has been Professor of Physical Chemistry within Chemistry at the University of Southampton since 1995. He graduated with a BSc in 1976 and a PhD in 1979 from the University of Bristol. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society from 1979 to 1984 developing surface sensitive optical spectroscopies, including ellipsometry and reflection absorption infra-red spectroscopy, for the investigation of adsorbed molecules on single crystal surfaces. He was a lecturer at the University of Bath from 1984 to 1988, developing supersonic molecular beam techniques to study reaction dynamics at single crystal metal surfaces.