After a series of post-doctoral research fellowships in the UK, US and Germany, my independent scientific career started in 1994 with receipt of a British Heart Foundation Fellowship, which I successfully renewed after five years. In 2001, I was awarded my Chair in Physiology at the University of Bristol and was the youngest professor in this institution (39 y). Having trained in classical in vivo cardiovascular/respiratory physiology and later in vitro brainstem slices, I was convinced that the field needed a preparation that shared all the advantages of these approaches. The in situ working heart-brainstem preparation was developed. This new approach allowed technical feats not possible before with existing animal models, resolved a major controversy in neuroscience in terms of compartmentalization, cellular and synaptic mechanisms for generation of respiratory rhythms and resulted in numerous international collaborations.

In 2017, I moved my laboratory to the Department of Physiology, University of Auckland, New Zealand, where I lead a multi-disciplinary translational research programme involving basic and clinical scientists with the aim of finding novel clinical therapeutic approaches for respiratory and cardiovascular diseases. I am Director of Manaaki Manawa, The Centre for Heart Research, Auckland, and co-Director of the Healthy Hearts for Aotearoa New Zealand, Centre of Research Excellence (NZ$ 41M) – a national united effort to address equity in heart health through research. I have published >400 papers (319 original, 83 reviews) on neural regulation of the cardiovascular and respiratory systems in health and disease (~15,000 citations); my h-index is 68. I have been the recipient of an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship (1992), the Sharpey-Schafer Prize of the Physiological Society (1990), the Carl Ludwig Prize Lecture of the American Physiological Society (2005), a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit award, UK (2006), Peter Baker Annual Lecturer, Kings College, London (2011), the Hood Fellowship at the University of Auckland, New Zealand (2011), the McIntyre Prize & Lecture, Univ Nebraska, Omaha, USA (2018),  Great Western Awards winner of  best BioDesign, Bristol, UK (2019) and made a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 2021.

ORCID Link to My Bibliography: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7410-2913

Google Scholar profile see: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=mQ1XDYwAAAAJ&hl=en