Professor Adam was born in Nairobi, Kenya. After completing his A-levels in Kenya, he went to Stanford University where he received his BS, majoring in Physics with a minor in Mathematics. He graduated with departmental honours and a University distinction. After spending four months as an exchange student at Magdalen College in Oxford University, Professor Adam went on to pursue his doctorate in Theoretical Physics at Cornell University, where he worked on the magnetic properties of nanoscale conductors. He then moved to the Condensed Matter Theory Center at the University of Maryland where he worked on the electronic transport properties of graphene. Before joining Yale-NUS College, Professor Adam spent three years as a National Research Council Fellow in the Center for Nanoscale Science and Technology at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology.