I grew up on a tiny island; seven miles at its longest, population 13,000. Holyhead isn't even in island off the coast of Britain - it's off the coast off another island - Anglesey - which is off the coast of Britain. Great Britain itself is referred to locally as "the mainland", which always amuses people from Europe. It sits in the Irish sea, and the main town serves as one of the UK's main ferry ports to Ireland, 60 miles to the west. Anglesey is connected to the mainland by two bridges, the oldest of which (1826) is the world's first modern suspension bridge, designed by engineer Thomas Telford; the other (1850) was designed by railway pioneer George Stephenson to carry trains to Holyhead. The names of engineers are woven into the place, with the gaps filled in by my father Eric, a marine engineer who worked at the ferryport, as many in my family did.

 

There wasn't much to do if you're not interested in fishing or climbing, so I used to lose myself in science; I particularly loved Carl Sagan's TV series Cosmos, which was ostensibly about astronomy but also included physics, biology, chemistry and philosophy - and most importantly, treated them as if they were the same thing. It sparked a real interest in cell biology for me, but this was the 80s and there were recessions, so I chose to specialise in something where there would be clear job opportunities, and studied electronics to become an engineer.

 

Then, when I was choosing a college, I attended an open day for the electronics department at Bangor University (then the University College of North Wales). Part of the tour included the research labs, where someone talked about their work on bioelectronics, how the nose worked as a sensor, how neurons act like computers, and inside my head a lightbulb switched on. This was it - a way of combining electronics, chemistry, physics and cell biology. I was hooked. When I had to choose two degrees, they were both at Bangor. Four years later, I took a final year project with the head of the Institute for Molecular and Biomolecular Electronics, Prof Ron Pethig, in 1991 on a subject called dielectrophoresis (DEP). Thirty years later I'm still doing it; the MEng was followed by a PhD supervised by Ron at Bangor and co-supervised by Peter Gascoyne, with whom I spent six months at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, which was followed by a three-year postdoc with Hywel Morgan in Glasgow. I then had a six-month stint as a lecturer at Glasgow before being offered a permanent job at the University of Surrey.

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In 1999 I was appointed as a Lecturer in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Surrey in Guildford, near London. Guildford is notable for many things, but my favourite fact is that it's mentioned in three science fiction classics: War of the Worlds (Well's original Martian capsule landed four miles north of Guildford, in Woking); Brave New World (it's where The Savage is exiled towards the end of the book: "On the north the view was bounded by the long chalk ridge of the Hog's Back, from behind whose eastern extremity rose the towers of the seven skyscrapers which constituted Guildford") and The Hitchhiker's Guide To the Galaxy (where Ford Prefect asks Arthur "What if I told you I really wasn't from Guildford - I was from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse?").

 

For many years I was quartered in the University's flagship (pun intended) Duke of Kent building (see left), which looks like a ship for no discernable reason (Guildford is 40 miles from the coast). Here I developed my DEP work alongside existing work within the Surrey group on neural implants. However, as time went on the implant work gradually diminished and the DEP work became my main research focus. Nevertheless, over the years I have always maintained "non-DEP" research, from neural implants to gait disorders in soldiers, from tattoo removal using lasers, to cryotherapy and spirometry.  

 

I was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2004, Reader in 2006 and finally Professor in 2008, when I also assumed the Directorship of the Centre for Biomedical Engineering. During that time I acted as Editor in Chief of IEEE Transactions on Nanobioscience for six years and Senior Editor for a further three, founded two companies, and become the most prolific publisher of papers on DEP.

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Then, from the mid-2010s, my emphasis began to shift; whilst still interested in DEP (which I remain to this day), I began to question what it all meant; DEP produces measures of cell electrophysiology which we took as fact, but which in fact revealed much deeper questions.  It started with why membrane conductance increases with medium conductivity in red blood cells, and why membrane conductance goes up when cytoplasm conductivity goes down.  And it spiralled from there into the Electrome project, zeta potentials, membrane potentials and all the rest of it, far from my initial DEP "home".   It became almost like a second PhD; a cluster of papers in 2021-2 which set a new direction for future research.  

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And then, it all changed; an offer from out of the blue at the start of the pandemic, turned into a new start at the beginning of 2022 when I took up the role of Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi, UAE.  What still motivates me is still the search for new things in the intersection between physics, electronics, chemistry and biomedicine, which my group continues to explore. There's plenty more to look for, and it still feels like we're at the start of the journey.

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