Adrian joined the University as an undergraduate in 2006, completing an undergraduate master’s degree in Aerospace Engineering in the department of Mechanical , Aerospace and Civil Engineering (MACE). During this time he worked for Rolls-Royce throughout the UK on the design of safety-critical systems including thrust reverser control for corporate aviation gas turbine engines. Having been award the prestigious Alumni Research Impact Scholarship, he completed his PhD in aero-acoustics in 2014, also at The University of Manchester, developing novel numerical methods and models associated with the scattering of acoustic waves in general environments. This research yielded a collection of practical methods for enhancing hybrid noise prediction. Adrian was awarded the ASME NCAD Best Student Paper award at Internoise 2012 for his work combining numerical conformal mapping and Green's functions to accelerate propagation approaches.

Adrian went on to work as a post-doctoral Research Associate (later Fellow) in MACE as the lead developer of the open-source Lattice-Boltzmann @ the University of Manchester (LUMA) project - a multi-grid, many-core Fluid-Structure Interaction solver in C++ based on the Lattice-Boltzmann Method. LUMA became a published, open-source code in 2018 and is used in the fields of aerodynamics, bio-engineering and flow control to develop new engineering solutions. During his research career he gained extensive experience in scientific software engineering in C/C++, GP-GPU programming in CUDA, OpenGL and GLSL, mobile application development in Android (Java/JNI), physical modelling, Virtual Reality and applied mathematics.

Adrian became a Lecturer in Virtual Engineering in MACE at the beginning of 2018 teaching Numerical Methods and Programming courses to all years of the undrgraduate engineering programmes. He gained his Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy in the same year.

In 2019, Adrian moved out of academia to become a Senior Research Software Engineer (RSE) in Research IT (RIT) at The University of Manchester. He was one of five RSE leads, responsible for managing projects and people within the RSE team. Adrian set up, and led, the RIT Mobile Development Service which designs, builds and releases cross-platform mobile applications for researchers across the whole University. The service completes around a dozen projects each year using a .NET / Xamarin / C# technology stack with a portfolio of value of around £160k. During this post he became a Chartered Engineer via the Institution of Engineering and Technology.

Since 2022, Adrian has been the Head of Research Software Engineering, leading a department of 50 engineers with annual income streams totalling around £2.5m. The department has over 70 active projects and many more in the pipeline bringing the department portfolio to roughly 100 projects with researchers across the whole University as well as national and international collaborators.

In 2025, Adrian expanded the department to incorporate other digital Research Technical Professionals (dRTPs) including agile devliery managers, data stewards and data engineers.

When working in academia, Adrian's research interests centered on the combination of modelling and simulation with energy-efficient parallel computing such as GPUs and mobile devices, and incorporate interactive technologies such as Virtual Reality and other human-computer interface devices. The use of clusters of P2P-connected mobile devices to facilitate interaction, real-time simulation on a large scale is a particularly exciting avenue for virtual engineering.