My research focuses in two main areas: 1) the use of cutting-edge omics methods to investigate ageing in extracellular tissues, whether the biological ageing process in modern tissues, or the geological ageing process in ancient tissues, and 2) the development and application of biomolecular methods in the study of human impacts on biodiversity, both in the past and present.

Overlapping with both of these areas is the use of palaeoproteomics - the study of ancient proteins through proteomic methods - proteins can tell us both about the changing structure of tissues, as well as be informative of species. Despite early research into the survival of non-collagenous bone proteins such as the small mineral-binding protein osteocalcin, most of my research focuses on type 1 collagen which is the major protein in bone and one of the most abundant in the animal kingdom. ZooMS, after 'Zooarchaeology by Mass Spectrometry', is what we call our approach to using protein fingerprints to differentiate between different taxa, which is particularly useful for fragmentary archaeological bone or the remains of juvenile individuals from morphologically similar species, such as sheep and goat. In archaeological applications we typically use the species identifications to investigate likely animal husbanding practises in the past, where my research has mainly focused on early Near Eastern agriculture including work in Cyprus and south-east Turkey. My current research uses molecular methods, such as high-throughput ZooMS, to investigate how vertebrate biodiversity has changed during the evolution of humans, but I am also investigating how collagen sequencing can aid our understanding of phylogenetic relationships among long extinct taxa from palaeontological sites worldwide.