After graduating with a degree in Physics with Geophysics from the University of Liverpool, Neil was awarded a Personal Fellowship from the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and obtained a post of Research Associate at the University of California in Santa Barbara (UCSB) to study the phenomenon of geomagnetic field reversals.

Subsequently, Neil qualified as a Medical Physicist and was appointed as Shell Research Fellow to setup a new Image Analysis Laboratory at the Magnetic Resonance and Image Analysis Research Centre (MARIARC) of the University of Liverpool, which had been built to house the first purchase in the UK of a commercial Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) system. Subsequently, as Director of MARIARC, and co-Pl on two Medical Research Council (MRC) Programme Grants, Neil established and led a research programme in “MR Studies of the Neural Bases of Cognition: Theoretical and Clinical Interactions”. This work was underpinned by setting up of a Tertiary Referral Service for pre-surgical evaluation of patients with Temporal Lobe Epilepsy (TLE), in collaboration with the nearby Walton Centre for Neurology and Neurosurgery (WCNN), a joint research programme in functional neuroimaging with the Cognitive Neuroscience Centre in the School of Psychology, University of Bangor and a research programme in the application of functional neuroimaging in Consumer Science with Unilever Research, plc.

Today Neil is Chair of Medical Physics and Imaging Science at the University of Edinburgh, based at Edinburgh Imaging Facility QMRI and a member of the Centre for Inflammation Research (CIR). In this role, Neil has been leading the development of new programmes of research using a 3 T Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRl) system. Most prominent among these is a research programme in Magnetic Resonance Elastography (MRE) that allows non-invasive measurement of tissue mechanical properties and which is supported by collaborations with Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Germany, Mayo Clinic, Minnesota, USA and The Mentholatum Company, East Kilbride. Neil’s group have pioneered new approaches to MRE data analysis and which are being applied in clinical studies of brain, muscle, kidney and uterus with colleagues in the College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine (CMVM). These studies are complemented by a new collaboration with the Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology (SIAT) regarding the development of robust non-invasive methods for measuring tissue temperature.

In Edinburgh Neil has also developed collaborations with the Centre for Cognitive Ageing and Cognitive Epidemiology (CCACE) in the School of Psychology, Institute for Music in Human and Social Development (IMHD), and Department of Psychiatry, concerning the application of structural Magnetic Resonance Imaging (sMRI), functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) in studies of brain structure, function and connectivity. These activities are supported by a longstanding interest in developing new mathematical methods for studying brain morphology, including with the School of Informatics and the University of Santander, Spain for measuring brain surface area and gyrification, and with the University of Oxford, West China Medical School in Chengdu, China, University of Rennes, France and University of Ghent, Belgium for measuring brain asymmetry.