I carried out my PhD on the genetics of Alzheimer disease with Alison Goate at Washington University, St Louis, as an external student of the University of London. My post-doc was on the quantitative genetics of anxiety with Jonathan Flint at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics in Oxford. Since 2001 I have been a Lecturer and then Senior Lecturer in Medical Genetics at the University of Leicester, now in the department of Genetics and Genome Biology. I have worked on a range of diseases but my projects now concentrate on finding genetic predictors of response to radiotherapy, especially normal tissue toxicity. We have been successful at finding SNPs associated with radiotherapy side effects, together with validating other biomarkers such as the RILA assay and circadian rhythm.