Adil Hasan started his career as a particle physicist and moved to distributed data management where he worked on data management for particle physics experiments whilst employed at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Centre, California, USA. He pioneered Grid tools for more automated distributed data management. He took part in the Persistent Archives Testbed (an early project on digital archiving). He continued work on data management when at the Rutherford Appleton Lab, Didcot, UK and on the EU digital preservation project SHAMAN when at the Univ of Liverpool. He then helped to setup the Research Data Archive in Norway for Sigma2.