My research aims to develop and apply advanced fluorescence spectroscopy and imaging techniques to study the metabolic processes involved in health and disease.

The classic biochemical approaches upon which our knowledge of metabolism has been developed are generally insensitive to the spatial organisation of cells and tissues, which is known to play a significant role in their function. Furthermore, they inevitably involve the destruction of samples, making it impossible to follow temporal changes. Post-extraction degradation of metabolites will affect precision, limiting their quantitative application. There is thus a pressing need for the establishment of techniques for probing metabolic phenomena in situ.

My goal is to achieve this by exploiting time- and polarisation-resolved fluorescence. These methods allow nanoscale processes, including conformational transitions, intramolecular interactions, and reaction-diffusion dynamics, to be investigated in samples ranging in size from isolated molecules and proteins to whole intact tissues. These techniques can be utilised to their full quantitative potential by combining expertise in both the physical and life science aspects of both the problem and the methodology. To this end, I study the underlying photophysics of biologically relevant fluorophores and apply these findings in the study of biochemical processes in living tissues 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 investigate the contrasting antioxidant roles of different cell types in complex tissues. Ongoing work is attempting to identify the excited state mechanisms governing Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET) between fluorescent proteins in order to allow its correct and accurate application in live cells and advance the ongoing effort to establish quantitative understanding of biological systems.