He graduated in Physics (BSc) from the University of Leeds in 1993, and obtained an MSc and PhD (1995-1998) at UMIST. He was hired as a lecturer in 2002 in the Materials Science department at the University of Manchester. He was Chair of Materials Science at the University of Exeter from 2011-2017. In September 2017 he moved to the University of Bristol. He was awarded the Rosenhain Medal and Prize in 2012 from the IOM3, the Hayashi Jisuke prize from the Japanese Cellulose Society (in 2017), the Swinburne Medal and Prize (IOM3) in 2020, and was the Chair of the ACS’s Cellulose and Renewable Materials Division. In 2021 he was awarded an EPSRC ED&I fellowship on Biobased Composites.