Born in Falkirk, Scotland, Gary A. Boyd is Professor of Architecture at Queen’s University, Belfast. Graduating from the University of Strathclyde in 1997, he took academic posts in University College, Dublin and University College, Cork, before joining Queen’s in September 2013. He was Head of Architecture at Queen's from 2016-2019.

In 2024, he was awarded a European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant for his project Architecture of Coal in Modern Europe (ACME). ACME - an interdisciplinary, humanities-based project which examines the architectures, urbanism and cultures produced by the coal industry within Europe - will last from 2024 until 2029.

He has published widely and has been the recipient of a series of prestigious awards and positions. Between 2018-2022, he was a Leverhulme Major Research Fellow which resulted in the publication of the  Architecture and the Face of Coal: Mining and Modern Britain (Lund Humphries, 2023). This book won the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion 2023 (SAHGB) for outstanding contrbution to architectural history.

He was project-leader on a Getty Foundation Keeping it Modern grant (2018-21) which investigated approaches to conservation and energy use in an architecturally significant modernist school in the Republic of Ireland.

In 2014, he was appointed joint curator/commissioner/designer of the Irish Pavilion, for the 14^th Architecture Biennale, Venice 2014. Following this, he assumed a similar role for Making Ireland Modern, a major exhibition which toured the Irish Republic in 2016 as one of the key strands in the Irish Arts Council's 1916-2016 centennial cultural programme.

He recently designed and curated an exhibition on architecture and pedagogy at EXPO 2020 in Dubai (January -May 2022) and presented work on decarbonising heritage at COP27 at Sharm el Sheik, Egypt (November 2022).

The recipient of two much such after awards from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (2021 and 2023), in 2021 he was invited to serve on the council of Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain.

He teaches an M.Arch studio (with Tom Jefferies) concerning landscapes of the near future. Students the studio presented their work at COP 27 at Sharm el Sheik in November 2022, and at the European Cultural Centre in Venice, June 2023.

He supervises PhD students in both humanities and design. These include a series of interdisciplinary and international collaborations. 

Hi research interests include the design of housing, prefabrication in architecture, curation and the representations of architecture, aspects of designed urbanity, building conservation and modernist heritage, and the architectures of extractive and fossil-based industries.