[7] In 2013, he was appointed the (Sir Thomas) Elder Professor of Mathematics at the University of Adelaide, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of South Australia.

[8] In 2021, he was awarded the prestigious Hannan Medal[9] and Lecture from the Australian Academy of Science, recognizing an outstanding career in Mathematics.

He then proceeded to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was awarded a doctorate under the supervision of Daniel Quillen, a Fields Medallist.

He currently works on mathematical problems that have their roots in physics, for example, topological field theories, fractional quantum Hall effect, and D-branes in the presence of B-fields.

Using the superconnection formalism of Quillen, they obtained a refinement of the Riemann–Roch formula, which links together the Thom classes in K-theory and cohomology, as an equality on the level of differential forms.

This has an interpretation in physics as the computation of the classical and quantum (super) partition functions for the fermionic analogue of a harmonic oscillator with source term.