My first astronomy job came when I left high school and worked for six months at the Royal Greenwich Observatory, at that time located at Herstmonceux Castle in Sussex. After a math degree at Churchill College, Cambridge and a summer job at Royal Observatory, Edinburgh, I began a Ph.D. at the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge (the real Cambridge, I mean). This turned out to be a work of fiction about stars that never existed and predicted a submillimeter background radiation that was later discovered and shortly thereafter retracted. I decided it was time to work on things one could really observe, and went to do a postdoc at Jodrell Bank. After a brief flirtation with the microwave background I got interested in the physics of quasars and have been stuck trying to figure them out ever since.

I came to CfA in 1988 as a postdoc, escaped to Huntsville, Alabama in 1991 but the lure of Harvard Square was too strong and I moved back to the Center for Astrophysics in 1992, studying quasars and nearby galaxies with the Chandra X-ray Observatory and helping the development of Chandra's CIAO data analysis system.

In 2026 I retired from the Center for Astrophysics and moved to the UK.

My Erdos number is 5

You can also read a more formal bio.