He began to immerse himself in chemistry to the extent that he built his own makeshift laboratory in his parent's home, complete with flasks and beakers and chemicals he purchased at a local supply store. That curiosity carried over into academic success and eventually earned him a scholarship for his undergraduate education.

Bartlett attended King's College in Durham (U.K.), where he received his Bachelor of Science degree in 1954 and his doctorate in 1958. That year Bartlett was appointed a lecturer in chemistry at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, where he remained until 1966, eventually reaching the rank of full professor. In 1966 he became a professor of chemistry at Princeton University while also serving as a member of the research staff at Bell Laboratories. In 1969, he joined the University of California, Berkeley, as a professor of chemistry, retiring in 1993. From 1969 to 1999 he also served as a scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Bartlett became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2000.

Bartlett's fame goes beyond the inert gas research to include the general field of fluorine chemistry. He holds a special interest in the stabilization of unusually high oxidation states of elements and applying these states to advance chemistry. Bartlett is also known for his contributions toward understanding thermodynamic, structural, and bonding considerations of chemical reactions. He helped develop novel synthetic approaches, including a low-temperature route to thermodynamically unstable binary fluorides, including NiF₄ and AgF₃. He discovered and characterized many new fluorine compounds and also produced many new metallic graphite compounds, including some that show promise as powerful battery materials.

¹ Neil Bartlett, "Forty Years of Fluorine Chemistry" in Fluorine Chemistry at the Millennium, ed. R.E. Banks; (Amsterdam: Elsevier Science, 2000), p. 28.