I was trained in Mathematical Statistics (BSc, PhD) at Sydney University and did postdoctoral work at the Thurstone Psychometric Laboratory at Chapel Hill. I joined the School of Behavioural Sciences at Macquarie University in 1969 and built up a small statistical consulting group there. I had a visiting year at the Educational Testing Service in 1971-2 as a Fulbright Senior Fellow, and left Australia in 1976 to take up an SSRC Professorial Fellowship in Statistics applied to the Social Sciences at the University of Lancaster, UK. I was later appointed Professor of Applied Statistics and foundation Director of the Centre for Applied Statistics at Lancaster. The Centre developed substantial research and consulting connections with the strong social science departments at Lancaster.
I left Lancaster in 1986 for a sabbatical year at Tel Aviv University, followed by an appointment as a Visiting Scholar at the Educational Testing Service. I returned to Tel Aviv as Professor of Statistics in the School of Mathematical Sciences. In 1992 I was awarded an ARC Senior Research Fellowship, initially at the Australian National University and then at the University of Western Australia, where I worked on foundational issues in statistics. At the conclusion of the fellowship I was appointed to the Chair of Statistics at the University of Newcastle, UK, from which I took early retirement in 2004. In 2000-2002 I held a consulting position in Washington DC as Chief Statistician at the Education Statistics Services Institute, a division of the American Institutes for Research which provided consultancy to the National Center for Education Statistics of the US Department of Education. I continued to work as a consultant for NCES after 2002 at Newcastle, and this continues in Melbourne.