Spotlight on Phil Hayes

Congratulations to Phil Hayes, who will be retiring this month after 53 years at UCL! Phil works at UCL Chemistry as the classroom manager, overseeing the running of the Turner Laboratory undergraduate teaching lab.  

Phil Hayes has been working at UCL since Jan 1965, he grew up and went to school locally, and joined UCL as a trainee when he was 16, doing part time training, and studying his A-levels on day release one day a week, eventually following with a chemistry degree.

UCL has been an important part of Phil’s life outside of work and study as well, he met his wife here, when she was also working in the Chemistry department, and two of his four children also studied in the Faculty of Mathematical & Physical Sciences, one in Chemistry and one in Earth Sciences. 
As classroom manager Phil manages the UCL Turner Laboratory teaching lab, which is about the size of a football pitch, and in term time is used by about 100 students a day. 

“53 years, it’s a bit scary really, when I tell people they often don’t believe it, but the reason why is that I’ve loved to do Chemistry, and I’ve always been happy in a lab environment. One of the main things about studying here is it shows you how important education is, my wife was a science teacher, so for our family it’s been an important part of our life” said Phil, on his time at UCL.
Phil has found that the largest change since he started at UCL has been the addition of computers! In order to manage the stock of chemicals and equipment and he use to have to keep thousands of pages of notes to keep track of schedules and stock controls, whereas now this data is stored automatically and only needs updating, quite a big change!
In his spare time Phil enjoys skiing, boating and dancing with his wife and family.