Department Chair and Hazel Buckland Professor in Psychological Medicine at the Dunedin School of Medicine, University of Otago, New Zealand. After graduating from Otago Medical School in 1980, he received psychiatry training in Auckland and in Oxford UK, and obtained MRCPsych in 1986. He was elected to FRCPsych in 2010.

In 1987 he moved to the US National Institutes of Health for preclinical neuroscience research and completed an MD in clinical psychopharmacology at the University of Bristol, UK in 1992. He was involved with translational clinical pharmacology research in the pharmaceutical industry for 18 years. He has published over 380 papers and abstracts, has 11 patents and several international research awards/prizes.

Since 2009 he has also been working as a consultant psychiatrist for the Southern District Health Board, in adult general psychiatry.

He has broad research interests, in pharmacology, clinical trial design and statistics (e.g. trial simulation, adaptive trial designs). His research interests include development of novel therapeutics, and treatment of mood disorders.