He stayed in Oxford for his Doctor of Philosophy degree, completed in 1978 with a thesis on the bioenergetics of the microbe Paracoccus denitrificans, supervised by Stuart Ferguson[2][14] and Philip John.

[1] He has also been involved in the development of multivariate scientific instrumentation and the attendant machine learning software (his first paper on artificial neural networks was in 1992).

[18] He has also been involved in research to create a robot scientist[19] in collaboration with Ross King, Stephen Muggleton and Steve Oliver, as well as several projects in systems biology.

To this end, he has recently returned to the study of bioenergetics, summarising the detailed evidence against the prevailing wisdom of chemiosmotic coupling in oxidative and photosynthetic phosphorylation, replacing it with a protet-based model.

[30] In 1988, he was a founding director of Aber Instruments, based at Aberystwyth Science Park (originally at the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT), Machynlleth, Wales).

He is an Associated Scientific Director of the Centre for Biosustainability at the Technical University of Denmark, where he runs the Flux Optimisation and Bioanalytics Group.