He worked as a demonstrator in the zoology department at
Oxford and completed his D. Phil. in 1961; the title of his thesis was "Functional aspects of the structure of bone, with special reference to Haversian systems". He moved to the new
biology department at York University in 1964. He spent a year in 1969 at the Veterans Administration Hospital and
Case Western Reserve University,
Cleveland, USA. In 1970, he returned to York as a professor. Although his main area of research was the mechanics of bone, he spent some years studying the polymorphism of shell colouration in
Cepaea snails, particularly in collaboration with
Arthur Cain. He investigated bone and other hard tissues from a particularly diverse range of vertebrates (e.g.
narwhal tusk, crocodile nasal bone and whale
bulla), and a number of his papers dealt with the biomechanics of mollusc shells and other invertebrate skeletons. He was head of the Department of Biology at York from 1984 to 1990, after which he became
Deputy Vice Chancellor. He retired in 1999 and was named as
professor emeritus. He authored over one hundred papers, appearing between 1959 and 2020. == Personal life ==