In the UK I studied applied physics in the early 70’s, and then moved to Italy with a PhD grant from the European Commission.

On the my very first day in the lab in Italy, I met the love of my life, my French wife Monique.

Later as a research physicist I worked in Germany, then back again in Italy, and then in France. In those days versatility was the key, and I worked in the fields of radiation physics, nuclear reactor physics, neutron measurements for radioactive waste, each involving an increasing amount of scientific code development.

In 1981 I passed a open competition for the European Commission and was recruited to the Euratom Nuclear Inspectorate in Luxembourg. There I spent 12 years as a nuclear inspector, and specialist in nuclear safeguards instrumentation and containment & surveillance techniques.

Staying within the European Commission, in 1993 I moved into the broad field of research & development funding. Initial in the field of information services and the new multimedia technologies and online content services. This was the early days of optical media and the emergence of the Internet and the Web as part of the so-called Information Superhighways.

Then successively I was responsible for funding programs in information engineering, digital cultural heritage, and human-computer interaction, including machine translation.

Alongside this I was also responsible for a substantial legacy portfolio of novel innovation projects. These looked at the challenges facing those trying to introduce new technologies into traditional economic sectors such as food, agriculture, furniture, textiles and clothing, prenatal and hospital care, etc.