My Ph.D. was awarded by the Institute of Neurology (jointly with John Morgan-Hughes and John Clark, University of London) working on skeletal muscle diseases associated with defects in the mitochondrial repiratory chain. I continued to study energy metabolism as a post-doc in Oxford (with Sir George Radda) using whole body NMR methods and became interested in a number of other disease areas, cardiovascular, diabetes and peripheral vascular disease. My move to industry started in parasitology, working on filarial worms, causative agents of river blindness (Onchocercasis) and lymphatic disease (elephantiasis). I also worked on the compound, (Atovaquone/Mepron) prescribed for the treatment of malaria and pneumocystis carinii. Following the merger of Glaxo and Wellcome my focus became kinases, high throughput screens and parallel selectivity profiling. With the merger of GlaxoWellcome with SmithKline I ran an assay development (SAR and HTS) group concentrating on protease selectivity profiling. In February 2003, I took up my current position at Upstate, delivering assays and platforms to the drug discovery market.