Prior to his appointment at Edinburgh he was a Reader in Computer Science at the University of Manchester where he was a major contributer to the MU5 project.
He is a past Vice-President of EQANIE, the European Quality Assurance Network for Informatics Education, and was the first chair (2010 - 2017) of the EQANIE Accreditation Committee.
Following retirement, he is no longer active in research (so no longer supervising students or visitors) but still maintain an interest in HASE, a Hierarchical computer Architecture design and Simulation Environment developed at Edinburgh under his supervision. This environment is effectively a virtual laboratory for research in computer architecture. Simulation models of a variety of computer architectures and architectural components were created using HASE. These models are intended for use as teaching and learning resources: in lectures, for student self-learning or for virtual laboratory experiments. The source files for these models and further information about HASE can be found in the GitHub HASE repository.