[citation needed] After completing a final year undergraduate project to map different types of supernovae onto the Morphological Catalogue of Galaxies, he was invited to start a PhD in Astronomy at the University of Manchester under the supervision of Franz Daniel Kahn.

[16][17][18] He has also conducted short courses for officials through the Shanghai Administration Institute,[19][20] and writes on the West's evolving relations with China,[21][22] as well as events surrounding the protests in Hong Kong.

[27] He publicly defended the need for BP to continue its exploration work in the Gulf of Mexico at the time of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill,[28] and he supported the initial response of the Japanese authorities to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant emergency.

[34] He has also addressed what he sees as the demise of strategic thinking and a concomitant crisis of diplomacy, most recently evidenced by the responses of senior British government ministers to the Sergei Skripal, former-spy poisoning episode in the UK.

[35] His 2011 articles investigating how the World Health Organization addressed the 2009 flu pandemic,[36][37][38] anticipated the cultural and institutional responses to COVID-19 which, he proposed, would lead to considerably more fatalities than the virus itself.

[39] His concern since, was that the episode would lead to: "suspicion, avoidance and intolerance towards others, an unwillingness to embrace life’s uncertainties, fear of future emergencies, a dystopian, anti-human outlook and narrative, and all too willing acceptance of the curtailment of civil liberties, combined with a paralysing dependence on others".

[citation needed] He featured in the 2004 BBC British Academy of Film and Television Arts award-winning documentary series produced by Adam Curtis; 'The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear'.