Chris Buckley graduated from Balliol College, Oxford with a degree in chemistry, before completing a PhD at Wolfson College, Oxford, and post-doctoral work at Columbia University, New York. His PhD involved following free radicals and electron pairs in solution using ESR. He subsequently shifted focus to work on consumer understanding and modelling for a multinational company, developing skills in field work and interviewing, as well as in integrating qualitative and quantitative data.

In the mid-1990s, Chris moved to Asia, spending time in Japan, Hong Kong, and China. For part of this period, he ran a workshop making traditional rugs in Lhasa, Tibet, and worked with the NGO Tibet Poverty Alleviation Fund on recording traditional crafts such as furniture-making and natural dyeing. This work led to a book on traditional Tibetan furniture and served as his introduction to the rich traditions of textile-making across Asia and beyond. Since 2019, Chris has devoted most of his time to research, dividing his time mainly between Berkeley, California, and Oxford, UK.

Chris has a longstanding interest in evolutionary biology. As an undergraduate at Oxford in the 1980s, he followed the revolution brought about in biology by cladistic methods, and later the second revolution in molecular biology and new methods of phylogenetic reconstruction in the 1990s. His first attempt to apply these methods to textile culture was an analysis of the relationships between ikat textile motifs in Southeast Asia, published in PLoS One in 2012. During that work, it became clear that loom designs were the most durable and conservative aspect of traditional textile making, as well as having the potential to reveal how technology evolves in traditional contexts. This has been his focus area since 2012.