He is the Lead Clinician in stroke medicine and is an honorary senior lecturer at Imperial College. He qualified from St Marys Hospital in 1978. After 3 years of junior posts in London, he went to Baragwanath hospital (the Soweto General Hospital in South Africa) as a medical registrar for 2 1/2 years. Following this, he worked for a year as a doctor in the Ethiopian famine 1984-5.