About me

I read Physics at St. Catherine’s and stayed on at College to complete my DPhil in Physics at the Clarendon Laboratory.  I then moved the short distance from the Clarendon to the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory to take up a post-doctoral research position with Professor John Goodenough (previously Head of Inorganic Chemistry and now an Honorary Fellow of the College) working on some of the earliest lithium battery research.  In 1983, I moved to the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory to help set up the diffraction facilities at what was to become the ISIS spallation neutron source. I returned to Oxford in 2006 as a Visiting Professor in Inorganic Chemistry and was elected to a Fellowship by Special Election in Physics at the College. In October 2013, I was appointed to the joint position of Professor of Chemistry in Oxford and STFC Senior Fellow at ISIS.

Research and graduate supervision

I have a small group of DPhil students and PDRAs and our research is principally based on new materials for sustainable energy applications, with an emphasis on energy storage and on the storage of hydrogen and ammonia in particular. Throughout my career, I have been involved in the development of neutron and X-ray diffraction techniques in combination with computational modelling and have written a number of computer programs and packages for crystallographic analysis and data visualisation.

ISIS webpage