With such a broad academic background it is hardly surprising that he often finds himself working in multidisciplinary projects alongside engineers, medics, chemists and biologists and on problems as diverse as studying the inner workings of cancer cells to the manufacture of mirrors for forthcoming generations of extremely large astronomical telescopes. While imaging, microscopy and metrology are the mainstays of his work, underpinning this are technologies that enable the control of light by computer that are now changing how we view the potential applications of optical systems.