Since 2004 I have been working in the field of Physics Education Research, which is a form of discipline-based scholarship of teaching and learning. I am interested in how students best learn physics, particularly in first-year university courses.

From 1992 to 2000, I was active in Astronomy research. Some examples are:

• In 1993 I discovered a star. Gliese 372 was previously thought to be a single star, but using spectra I took at the David Dunlap Observatory in Richmond Hill, I discovered that it was in fact a double-lined spectroscopic binary. So the star I discovered was named Gliese 372 B. ( https://www.researchgate.net/publication/234546800_The_M_Dwarf_Double-Lined_Spectrscopic_Binary_Gliese_372 )
• In 1996-1997 I designed, built and commissioned the first spectograph used at the Hobby Eberly Telescope at McDonald Observatory in Texas, the Upgraded Fiber Optic Echelle spectrograph (UFOE).
• In 1998 I was involved in a project to measure the distance to Geminga, a neutron star and supernova remnant in the constellation Gemini. Geminga can be seen using visible light with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), and I attempted to use archival HST data to measure the parallax of Geminga as the Earth orbits the sun, thus inferring its distance.
• In 2000 I completed my PhD thesis entitled The Faint End of the Stellar Luminosity Function, which was a study of the number density of stars in the solar neighbourhood.

ORCID iD 0000-0003-1603-0792