I studied chemistry at Oxford University and completed my DPhil in the group of Professor Keith McLauchlan, FRS, studying the effects of small magnetic fields on chemical reactions induced by light and involving free radicals; a topic which has implications for animal navigation. I have recently returned to this topic with a grant funded by DARPA. In order to augment these studies, I used time-resolved EPR (TR-EPR) in order to detect and identify radicals that had been produced by electron transfer following excitation by a nanosecond laser pulse.

I moved to the Department of Physics at the Free University Berlin in October 1993 to join the group of Professor Klaus Möbius, where I built up extensive experience of advanced EPR methods for studying photoactive species first as a postdoctoral fellow and then as a staff scientist.

In January 2006, I moved to University College London. I chose UCL because of the concentration of the world-leading research taking place in Bloomsbury. Within 3 years, I led a successful cross-faculty CIF bid to create a state-of-the-art EPR laboratory that was opened in 2010 and is now located in the Department of Physics & Astronomy. From being an institution with a rich tradition of EPR, yet where activity had ceased, under my leadership UCL is now a world-leading center and grant-funded research is bringing EPR spectroscopy to research from physics to structural biology and medicine.