Yearley was educated at
Sir George Monoux Grammar School, Walthamstow, and studied natural sciences and then social and political sciences at
Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He completed a PhD in sociology, supervised by
Michael Mulkay, at the
University of York from 1978 to 1981. H began to concentrate on environmental issues in 1983 while at
Queen's University Belfast and was closely associated with
Friends of the Earth, the
Ulster Wildlife Trust and Northern Ireland Environment Link. He became the first Professor of Sociology at the
University of Ulster in 1992. In 2006, Yearley became director of the Genomics Forum, a research institute funded by the ESRC. At the Forum, he focused primarily on environmental aspects, such as issues regarding
synthetic biology, and on new ventures in public engagement with the science and technologies of genomics. In 2010, Yearley was elected Fellow of the
Royal Society of Edinburgh. Yearley is on the editorial boards of the journals
Social Studies of Science and
Nature and Culture, and he co-edited
The SAGE Dictionary of Sociology. ==Books==