After a degree in physics followed by a PhD developing time resolved laue crystallography I have spent my entire career based at synchrotron facilities developing X-ray methods for biology.

I worked for many years at the Synchrotron Radiation Source (SRS) at Daresbury Laboratory near Warrington in the UK where I was active in developing methods for macromolecular crystallography including MAD phasing and the early attempts at automation of both data collection and data processing. I was responsible for the design and construction of several beamlines whilst I was at the SRS which meant that taking the position to lead the design and construction of the first beamlines for macromolecular crystallography at the new third generation UK synchrotron, Diamond, was a logical move.

Once I had completed the design, construction and commissioning of the first beamlines for MX at Diamond I became interested in the power of X-ray imaging for biology. I was heavily involved in the development for cryo soft X-ray imaging and was responsible for the design and construction of the cryo soft X-ray microscope at Diamond.

My interest then moved to the development of hard X-ray imaging of soft biological tissue which led me to my current position of Team Leader for Biological X-ray Imaging at EMBL Hamburg. Here in Hamburg we have developed HiTT (high throughput tomography) which we use to image tissue often in a correlative pipeline with other imaging modalities.