I’m a theoretical physicist. It’s fair to say that I’m a very theoretical physicist. I work on black holes and the Big Bang and quantum things. Much of my research is involved in understanding quantum fields — how they behave, and what they can do.

I came to Cambridge in 2004, but worked or studied at many universities before that. I did my undergrad at the University of Nottingham and my PhD at the University of Wales in Swansea. I then held research positions at TIFR in Mumbai, King’s College in London, Columbia, and New York, as well as a visiting position at Stanford.

Quantum field theory is the language in which all of modern physics is written. It’s what you get when you insist that no signal can travel instantaneously in a quantum world, and it provides the mathematical framework to describe the creation and destruction of hoards of particles as they pop in and out of their ethereal existence and interact.

Whether you want to understand the ultimate building blocks of nature, the collective behaviour of electrons inside solids, or how black holes evaporate, you need to work with quantum field theory. Moreover, it has also proven to be a remarkably subtle and rich subject for mathematicians, providing insights into many new areas of mathematics.