Graduate in Mathematics (University of Oxford, 1982). PhD in Mathematical Biology (University of Oxford, 1985). 

He is the author of many scientific papers. Specifically, he co-authored with Jonathan Sherratt and Paul Dale a Bellman Prize winning paper (1997), was awarded a Royal Society Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowship for 2001-2 and a Royal Society-Wolfson Research Merit Award (2006-11). In 2009 he was awarded the LMS Naylor Prize and Lectureship and in 2014 he was listed in "The World's Most Influential Scientific Minds 2014" (Thomson Reuters). In 2107 he was awarded the Arthur T. Winfree Prize from the Society of Mathematical Biology (SMB).

He is on the editorial boards of a large number of journals, including serving as the Editor-in-Chief of the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology [2002-15]. He has also been an elected member of the Boards of the Society for Mathematical Biology (SMB) and European Society for Mathematical and Theoretical Biology (ESMTB). He is a Fellow of the IMA (FIMA), a SIAM Fellow, an Inaugural SMB Fellow, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology (FRSB), and Miembro Correspondiente (Foreign Fellow), La Academia Mexicana de Ciencias (AMC). In 2015 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS), and in 2017 he was elected Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci), and Foreign Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy (FNA).

His research is interdisciplinary and involves constructing mathematical models of spatiotemporal processes in biology.