Derek is a theoretician who has worked at the Unilever Research Laboratory, Port Sunlight and the School of Chemistry, Bristol University before he returned to Australian on a Queen Elizabeth II Fellowship. When he is not on the tennis court, he enjoys solving theoretical problems in interfacial science, fluid mechanics, soft materials and surface forces with experimental colleagues in the Particulate Fluids Processing Centre. He has active collaborations with universities and research laboratories in Canada, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, UK and USA. (And for those who care about metrics, he has authored over 200 scientific papers and, according to Google Scholar, his work has been cited over 10,000 times with an h-index of 57.)