text: He was educated at Bootham School, a private school in York, and at Balliol College, Oxford. After obtaining a Doctor of Philosophy with a thesis entitled A structural investigation of some compounds showing charge-transfer properties, he became lecturer in chemistry at the (new) University of Stirling and was first warden of Andrew Stewart Hall of Residence. In 1982, he moved to Glaxo Group Research at Greenford to head Molecular Graphics, Computational Chemistry and later protein structure determination. He was Professor of Pharmacy in the University of Nottingham from 1996 to 2000, setting up the Virtual School of Molecular Sciences. He is now Reader Emeritus in Molecular Informatics at the University of Cambridge and Senior Research Fellow Emeritus at Churchill College, Cambridge.