I have played a major role in the development of neutron scattering techniques in the UK and have exploited this technique in wide range of investigations, particularly concerned with the behaviour of hydrogen in metals, having currently published 184 refereed journal papers in this area. In the last 20 years, my papers have been cited 2612  times (Oct 2011) with a corresponding h-index of 29.

Since 2000, I have obtained 30 grants totalling £2,594,827, from a variety of sponsors including EPSRC and FP6.  Recently, our research has concentrated on the development of hydrogen storage materials for use with hydrogen/fuel cell cars. We have recently been involved in three FP6 projects in this area (NESSHy, HySIC and HyTRAIN  and a related project funded by the Joule Centre. We currently hold an EPSRC (Responsive Mode) grant concerned with the development of a novel approach to the interpretation of coherent inelastic neutron scattering from polycrystals to model the dynamics of materials -  hydrogen storage materials in particular and nanomaterials in general. This is being developed (Daniel Roach) as a major international collaboration with Caltech, Pacific North West Labs (DoE, USA), EMPS (Switzerland), Perth, Cambridge, ISIS and the ILL.We also hold a further grant as part of a EPSRC consortium (Fundamentals of Graphite) in which we are applying various neutron scattering techniques to the study of radiation damage in nuclear reactor grade graphite (See RISE, Sept 2011). We have also recently completed an ORSAS-funded PhD project (Zhana Mileeva) concerned with the adsorption of hydrogen molecules in activated carbon, studied using microgravimetric techniques and Small Angle Neutron Scattering.

I am currently a member of the EPSRC college of referees. I am also a referee for more than thirty journals and assess grant applications on behalf of the Norwegian, Polish, Georgian, Irish, Ukraine and US national research organisations, the British Council and the EPSRC.  I have recently completed an assignment as an expert referee for the recent Fuel Cell/Hydrogen call in FP7.

I am currently Chair of the Science and Technology Section of the Manchester Literary and Philosophy Society. I have given a considerable number of invited lectures at international conferences and am currently on the International Steering Committee (until recently Secretary) of the International Symposia in Hydrgen Metal Systems. We are bidding to bring this conference to Salford in 2014.