After leaving Scotland at 14, I was educated at Roundhay School, Leeds and I then obtained a Mathematics BSc in 1975 and a Statistics MSc in
1976 at Imperial College, University of London. I joined the new Cosmology Group at the University of Durham in 1976 to obtain a PhD in
Physics entitled "Statistical Analyses of Galaxy Catalogues." In 1979 I was appointed a postdoctoral research assistant and in 1981 an SERC Fellow
at Durham. In 1983 I was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship at Durham which I held till my appointment as Lecturer in
Physics here in 1991. I was appointed Reader in Physics in 1994 and Professor of Physics in 2000
My research interests span a wide range of observational cosmology. I started by using COSMOS machine measurements of UKST and AAT
plates during my PhD thesis to measure statistics of galaxy counts and clustering. This research soon extended into 3-D investigations of large-scale
structure using galaxy redshift surveys. This work continues to the present via galaxy redshift surveys using fibre optic techniques, first at the
Anglo-Australian Telescope and then at the UK Schmidt Telescope. After my PhD, I also used COSMOS to make large, UVX samples of QSOs
which could be followed up using fibre-optic spectroscopy at the AAT. In this way we investigated the luminosity and clustering evolution of
QSOs. The QSO work was extended into the X-ray using deep ROSAT observations of our optical QSO survey fields. The current aim of our QSO
research is a project to make a new redshift survey of 25000 B=21 QSOs using the AAT 2dF facility. For the last 10 years I have also been
investigating whether the resolution of the Universal Age problem may reside in the measurement of Hubble's Constant. I have used both the
University of Durham MARTINI adaptive optics instrument and the Hubble Space Telescope to make fundamental tests of the reliability of the
distance scale. The galaxy counts work also continues to the present day with our deep CCD data at the William Herschel Telescope reaching
B=28mag and our deep IRCAM3 data from UKIRT reaching K=23. We have also made observations of faint X-ray galaxies using the ISO
satellite. We have also won time on the Chandra X-ray satellite to observe these X-ray galaxies and to make
I am currently teaching a General Relativity course and a Hydrodynamics course to Level 4 Physics undergraduates. I have previously taught the
Level 3 Galaxies and the Universe course. I am Level 3 Physics Course Director and also Research Astrophysics Seminar Organiser.
I married my wife Kathryn in 1979 and have two children, Cameron and Susan.
