Brad was responsible for using exploding stars to determine the expansion rate of the Universe, as part of the Hubble Space Telescope Key Project on the Extragalactic Distance Scale, for which his team was awarded the Gruber Prize in Cosmology. He was the first to identify the locations within the Milky Way most likely to harbour complex biological life, for which his work was named by National Geographic magazine as one of the Top 10 News Stories of the Year. Brad's work has been acknowledged by his peers 30,000 times, making him the University of Hull's most cited academic, and ranking him within the top few percent in the world.
Brad has been responsible for doubling the number of women entering physics at the University, as part of his commitment to widening participation and gender diversity in science, and improving the career prospects of physics students; this has all been accomplished under his "Changing Face of Physics" campaign, which led to the Department's Athena Swan award, and the campaign being named Best Practice in the Country by the UK's Equality Challenge Unit.
Brad is the University of Hull's most active outreach and public/schools engagement academic. Since 2016, he has run 500 events, reaching more than 30,000 people in-person (including 15,000+ students across 60 different schools and colleges, 60% of whom reside in the bottom two POLAR4 socio-economic quartiles. His online/media appearance have reached a further two million people around the world. His outreach efforts led to him being named the Institute of Physics’ John Porter Memorial Lecturer, the Leon Davies Lecturer (Glasgow), the Ray Bootland Memorial Lecturer, and Manchester’s Bexwyke Lecturer; he has spoken at the Cheltenham Science Festival, the British Science Festival, the Royal Institution of Great Britain, and opened for Brian Cox and Lucy Hawking at European AstroFest, and delivered a highly popular TED talk on the subject of the search for alien life.