I was born in Montreal, Canada and completed a Joint Honours Mathematics & Physics BSc degree at McGill University in 1990. I did my MSc and PhD degrees in Theoretical Physics at the University of British Columbia under the supervision of Gordon Semenoff. I then did postdoc stints at Oxford University in 1995 and the Niels Bohr Institute in 1998, before settling permanently at Heriot-Watt in 2000. My research centres around the applications of geometrical and topological methods to problems in quantum field theory and string theory, focusing in particular on techniques drawn from K-theory, noncommutative geometry and algebraic geometry.