His group develops materials for application in biological environments, characterising relationships between the surface and biological response. Understanding these relationships is critical in the development of the biomaterials of the future and is the theme running through his group's work across a variety of biomedical application areas spanning bacterial adhesion to controlling stem cell response. Much progress has been made in discovering new biomaterials using a high throughput materials screening approach.
He has contributed to books on surface chemical modification and analysis and has authored over 200 papers dealing with surfaces in high quality peer reviewed publications, including research articles in Nature Biotechnology, Nature Materials, Nature Methods, Nature Communications, Advanced Materials, PNAS and Biomaterials. This research is highly interdisciplinary, involving collaborators from a wide variety of fields including regenerative medicine, neuroscience, developmental biology, pharmaceutics, materials processing, plasma physics and nanofabrication, in the UK and with leading groups around the world, eg MIT and La Trobe. This work is funded by The Wellcome Trust, EPSRC, BBSRC, MRC and industry. A number of his group have gone on to take up independent research posts.