Peter was appointed Reader (Assistant Professor) in surgery at University of Oxford in 2004, and full Professor in 2013. He graduated from Aberdeen University and underwent surgical and academic training in Glasgow, before becoming Senior Lecturer at Liverpool University in 1992. Peter has a long-held interest in the problems of clinical research in surgery and other areas where treatments are complex and depend on practitioner skill. He has published extensively on the difficulties of doing RCTs in these areas and was the driving force for the development of the IDEAL Framework and Recommendations. These attempt to provide an integrated evaluation pathway for complex interventions throughout their life cycle, analogous to that which exists for pharmaceuticals. Peter currently chairs the IDEAL Collaboration, an initiative to improve the quality of clinical research in surgery and other complex treatments. He also has a major interest in patient safety issues, and runs a research group (QRSTU) and a training group (Patient Safety Academy) focused on this area.