He moved to Hertfordshire in 2004 and has extended his work into instrumentation with the development of the Bayfordbury Observatory, led the IoP accreditation of the University of Hertfordshire Physics degree and chaired the inaugural European Week of Astronomy and Space Science. In his research he has been fortunate to have great collaborators and so be able to make a contribution to the burgeoning fields of brown dwarfs and extrasolar planets. Thus Hertfordshire can claim close involvement in the discovery and characterisation of a significant fraction of the nearby extrasolar planets and brown dwarfs including the discovery of planets orbiting the Sun's nearest neighbours, Proxima Centauri and Barnard's star.