About the Author

I was born in 1966 the year that England last won the football world cup. My father was a dentist and when I was a young child, my parents bought me a Ladybird book on the nine systems of the human body. It was this book that made me fall in love with science and, in particular, biology.

When I was about 6 years old, my big sister took me to see the musical “Jesus Christ Superstar”. Although, this musical is not particularly theologically sound, because it strips Jesus of his divinity, it does leave Jesus’ humanity intact. Jesus’ enigmatic character attracted me to Christianity and for me science and faith always worked well together because theology and science are surprisingly similar activities. Both involve complex and difficult to interpret data sets which theologians refer to as the special and general revelation of God respectively.

Between 1985 and 1988 I attended the University of Sydney where I obtained a first class honours degree majoring in physiology and biochemistry. My final fourth year honours project was culturing chick motoneurons on rat Schwann cells derived either from ventral or dorsal root spinal neurons.

My first job was working at Westmead hospital where I learnt all about data management and relational databases and this started me off in computer programming which I have always enjoyed. In 1992 I came over to England for what I thought would be about 1 year but I in fact never returned. From 1993 until 1996 I completed a PhD looking at what causes the cell shrinking in apoptosis. I then went on to complete a series of postdocs at Manchester University which included a research fellowship from the Wellcome trust to explore my first biotech idea of developing a system that could detect protein changes in cells in real time using fluoresence microscopy. In 2003 I left the University and went to work for AstraZeneca in Alderley Edge.

It was while working at Alderley Edge that I was first introduced to the concept of Systems Biology; working with pioneers like Doug Lauffenburger and also High Content Analysis (automated fluorescence microscopy). In 2007 I took a redundancy package from AstraZeneca and a very generous equipment donation to start my own company with a friend and colleague Dr Gareth Griffiths (World of Teaching and Learn In VR are two of his websites). The company was called Imagen Biotech and its primary goal was to sell High Content Screening services back to large pharma. In 2013 we changed the remit and focus of the company to create a new personalized chemotherapy company called Imagen Therapeutics

I left Imagen after selling shares in 2017 and wrote The Wormwood Deceptions which builds on C.S Lewis’ Screwtape Letters idea. In 2019 I bought into the Magical Maths Franchise which produces fun afterschool clubs with a mathematical theme. Recently, I started another company with colleagues called Dominion Biotech. This company will continue to supply cutting-edge patient-derived cancer cells models to assist the pharmaceutical industry in developing new innovative cancer treatments.

Another hobby of mine is writing programs to aid workflows. The software item on the main menu contains several programs I have written to accomplish very common tasks, like helping organise digital photos. Others programs I wrote while I was actively engaged in scientific research. One program for example is a Word addin that adds basic molecular biology functionality to Microsoft Word so that one can open DNA sequence files and search them for restriction sites etc. This program even allows you to check a basic molecular cloning strategy.

I am married to Helen and have two daughters Grace and Rebekah. I also enjoy bike riding, swimming, playing guitar, music, skiing (although sadly haven’t skied in years) tennis and chess.