In the early 1970s Adrian Bowyer read for a first degree in mechanical engineering at Imperial College, and then researched a PhD in tribology there. In 1977 he moved to Bath University's Maths Department to do research in stochastic computational geometry. He then founded the Bath University Microprocessor Unit in 1981 and ran that for four years. After that he took up a lectureship in manufacturing in Bath's Engineering Department, where he is now a senior lecturer.

His current areas of research are geometric modelling and geometric computing in general (he is one of the authors of the Bowyer-Watson algorithm for Voronoi diagrams), the application of computers to manufacturing, and biomimetics. His main work in biomimetics is on self-copying machines.