Stuart grew up in a small town in the south of England, after which he studied at Imperial College London. His PhD was undertaken at the University of Auckland, under the supervision of Scott Parkins. His thesis was on the topic of many-body cavity QED, and in particular, collective phenomena and entanglement generation in ensembles of spins. He joined the group following his interest in unusual collective effects in many-body quantum optics systems. In the fall of 2021, Stuart received the Martin and Beate Block Award to the most promising young physicist for his presentation at the Aspen Center for Physics winter conference Many-body cavity QED.