In 1935 he sailed to England with an Exhibition Scholarship to take up a fellowship at Oxford University, where he worked under Professor Cyril Hinshelwood at Trinity College.
In 1938 he took a post to teach physics at Repton School, but when war broke out he joined the Armament Research Department at Woolwich Arsenal as a Scientific Officer.
After a period studying deposited metal surfaces, he took the opportunity in 1948 to undertake a Kodak sponsored investigation into the behaviour of thin-sheet crystals of silver halides, a field of research that would dominate the rest of his career.
In 1956 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society for "his work on the borderline between physics and chemistry about the adsorption of gases on surfaces, on catalysis and on the processes occurring in photographic emulsions.
His tenure as Professor was broken in 1963 when he briefly returned to the UK to take up a position as Director of the National Chemical Laboratory, only for the NCL to be closed down the following year.