I received BScHons (1974) and PhD degrees (1977) from the University of Canterbury under the mentorship of Ward Robinson and the late Gordon Rodley. After a post-doctoral fellowship with Jim Ibers at Northwestern University in bioinorganic chemistry, I took up a research associate position in solid-state chemistry at the University of Zürich. In 1982, I returned to the USA to Georgetown University in Washington DC, earning tenure in 1987, as well as securing NIH and NSF grants. After a sabbatical in NZ with Ted Baker at Massey University (1989–1990), I finally returned to New Zealand in 1994, moving into structural biology. Since 2001, I have been Professor in Structural Chemistry and Biology. Awards and honours include: election as Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand (2003), the SGS Prize from the New Zealand Institute of Chemistry, the Massey University Research Medal (Individual) (2010), the Marsden Medal of the New Zealand Association of Scientists (2011). In 2005, I traveled widely in Pakistan, as a guest of the Pakistan Higher Education Commission. Along the way, I have published over 225 papers and book chapters, helped with NZ's investment and access to the Australian Synchrotron (ongoing), secured funding for NZ's highest field NMR spectrometer, the Bruker 700 MHz with Cryoprobe, advised on the MacDiarmid Institute-funded acquisition of Massey University's unique capability for chemical crystallography, and contributed fully to teaching.