He earned his PhD in the Botany School at Cambridge and then did a year's postgraduate research at the California Institute of Technology with Sterling Howard Emerson, whose daughter Ann he married.
[7] A year as an associate professor in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology preceded his appointment as head of the Genetics Division of the John Innes Centre (JIC) in 1961.
During his time at the John Innes Centre, his treatise with Peter Day, the first edition of Fungal Genetics (1963)[3] was released.
The book gathered existing knowledge of basic biology, recombination, tetrad analysis, mating systems, and extranuclear inheritance together with a single chapter on biochemical genetics, which provided a common background to a growing community of scientists.
He remained at the John Innes until 1966, when he was appointed as professor and head of the newly established Department of Genetics at University of Leeds.