I was born in London in 1952 and attended Bexley Grammar School. I studied Chemistry in Oxford University and graduated in 1975, after completing a project with Professor Malcolm Green on organometallic photochemistry. In 1976 I started my PhD, working with Professor Gordon Stone (Bristol) on the designed synthesis of heteronuclear transition metal clusters. After completing my PhD in 1979, I moved to UBC Vancouver in Canada, where I worked with Professor Brian James on heterogeneous catalysis using ruthenium-tin complexes. I returned to the UK in 1981, and worked again in Bristol on several postdoctoral projects involving cluster compounds. I was then appointed a Lecturer in Inorganic Chemistry at Manchester University Chemistry Department in 1983, before taking up an appointment as a Lecturer in Glasgow in 1984. In 1995 I was promoted to Senior Lecturer and to Reader in 2010. I have worked on aspects of the synthesis and fluxional behaviour of organotransition metal clusters (organising an NATO ASI workshop on "The Synergy between Dyanmics and Reactivity on Clusters and Surfaces" in 1994) and in the last ten years or so I have been interested in computational crystallography and experimental charge densities. My computer programs WinGX and Ortep for Windows are used worldwide in more than 70 countries and by more than 30,000 registered users. I am also a member of the XD programming team, who are responsible for the XD computer program, used in more than 100 laboratories worldwide for analysing experimental charge densities. I retired from the Chemistry Department in 2015.