My research focuses on the application of advanced fluorescence imaging techniques to the study of the fundamental biological processes that control health and disease.

As a physicist who has spent my research career to date working in both the Departments of Physics & Astronomy (with Dr. Angus Bain) and Cell & Developmental Biology (with Prof. Michael Duchen and Prof. Gyorgy Szabadkai), I believe genuine immersive interdisciplinarity is key to making significant progress in this field.

To this end, I study the underlying photophysics of biologically-relevant fluorophores using time-resolved polarised laser spectroscopy and apply these findings in the study of biochemical processes in living tissues, typically using fluorescence lifetime imaging microscopy (FLIM).

This approach identified the importance of the redox cofactor NADPH in controlling the intrinsic fluorescence decay characteristics of living tissues, a finding subsequently applied in interdisciplinary collaborations, both local and international, to identify contrasting antioxidant roles of different cell types in the mammalian cochlea, to investigate the role of the nicotinamide nucleotide transhydrogenase in heart failure and to probe the link between mitochondrial calcium uniporter expression and breast cancer progression.

Ongoing work is attempting to identify the excited state mechanisms underlying state restriction in fluorescent protein FRET probes in order to allow their correct and accurate application in the study of living cells and tissues, contributing towards the goal of a quantitative understanding of biological systems for the 21st century.