My research career began in the early 1990s where I cultured marine microalgae to understand the impacts of nutrient deficiency on cell metabolism. This led to more focussed work on algal lipid metabolism in particular, and from there the more general challenge of measuring the components of lipid metabolism in plants. I developed an ongoing interest and expertise in the analytical sciences to tackle this challenge, a key achievement being the development of a method for creating and separating by HPLC novel fluorescent derivatives of acyl CoAs, key intermediates in lipid metabolism. This work has been widely cited in the plant and animal lipid research communities. From there my interests have evolved to tackle the challenge of small molecule measurements and metabolomics using LC/GC MS approaches, mostly in plants but also in other biological systems. In my latest role as Head of Metabolomics and Proteomics I am now also involved in bottom-up proteomics. Central to all my work is an ongoing interest in manipulating large data sets to extract maximum biologically relevant information. My workflows thus span the fields of biology, chemistry, and now also bioinformatics, for which I write novel algorithms in R to facilitate mining complex LC/GC MS data