Dr Ashley Clarke graduated from Imperial College, London in 1967 and gained his doctorate there in space physics in 1972. After a research assistantship at Imperial College he joined the University of Leeds as a lecturer in physics in 1972. In the 1980s he designed the microprocessor-based, Vela datalogger for school science laboratories. He was appointed Senior Lecturer in 1991. For the past thirty years, he has been actively involved with various research activities: ground-based astronomy, balloon-based and far-infrared astronomy and computer-assisted microscopy for materials science. He has lectured physics, electronics and microelectronics and is on the editorial board of the Journal of Microscopy.