[10] First convenor University of Adelaide’s Committee on Ethics,[11] of experimentation on humans, Member for the University of Adelaide of committees for the ethics of experiments on animals, and for the Institute of Medical and Veterinary Science South Australia,[12] and SA Pathology, a couple of decades of each till 2017.
Nerlich has never had a religious faith,[19] and is opposed to religions generally as they are liable to promote commandment ethics and as influential but misleading falsehoods and dogmas; he wrote on this theme the article on 'Popular arguments for the existence of God' in the 1967 Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Nerlich was elected immediately and quickly moved to allow student representation at staff meetings, among other democratic measures.
Nerlich’s research and publication in his two decades in the Hughes Chair was divided mainly between studies in the ontology of space, time and space-time, and ethics.
In the former and larger output he defended realism toward space-time and especially a unique role for it in ontology as providing geometrical, non-causal explanation in General Relativity.