He then shifted to The Flinders University of South Australia where, in 1985, he was awarded his Ph.D. degree in Theoretical Physics for his thesis, ``Soliton bags in quantum field theory".
His first postdoctoral position was working with Prof. Tony Thomas in the Theoretical Physics group at the University of Adelaide from 1984-86.
Following this he moved to the U.S. to work with the Nuclear Theory group in the Department of Physics at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he was a postdoctoral research associate for three years from 1986-89. The department is also host to the National Institute for Nuclear Theory which is supported by the (U.S.) Department of Energy.
In August 1989 he began work as an Assistant Professor at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida, where he had a joint appointment in the Department of Physics and in the Supercomputer Computations Research Institute (SCRI), which has now evolved into the School of Computational Science and Information Technology (CSIT). In August 1993 he was promoted to Associate Professor at FSU.
He was elected a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Physics in 1992.
In January 1993 he took a one-year leave of absence from Florida State University to undertake a position at the University of Adelaide as a Lecturer. He elected to remain in Adelaide, but maintains ties with Florida State University.
In January 1995 he was promoted to Senior Lecturer at the University of Adelaide.
He is Deputy Director and co-founder (with Prof. Tony Thomas, Director) of the Special Research Centre for the Subatomic Structure of Matter (CSSM). The CSSM commenced operations in 1997 and is a 9 year Special Research Centre funded by the Australian Research Council.
He was promoted to Associate Professor in January 1998.
He was Chair of the Nuclear and Particle Physics Group (NUPP) of the Australian Institute of Physics from 1997-2000.
He was Chair of the Organizing Committee for the 14th National Congress of the Australian Institute of Physics (AIP2000) in December 2000, which had over 680 registered participants.
He is founding Director of the South Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (SAPAC). SAPAC is an unincorporated joint venture of the three South Australian universities: the University of Adelaide, Flinders University, and the University of South Australia. SAPAC commenced operations in September 2002. SAPAC grew in part from the Centre for High-Performance Computing and Applications, which was a University of Adelaide Research Centre that Tony founded in 2001. Here is a brief story and photograph scanned from a local paper and (with poor resolution) from a national newspaper.
He is also currently Deputy Director of the National Institute for Theoretical Physics (NITP). He was Deputy Head of the Department of Physics and Mathematical Physics from 2000-2002.
In 2001 he was awarded the Walter Boas Medal by the Australian Institute of Physics for his research.
In October 2002 he was elected as the first Fellow of the American Physical Society in the newly formed Topical Group in Hadron Physics (GHP).
He was elected Chair of the Board of the Australian Institute for High-Energy Physics (AUSHEP) in October 2002.
He was promoted to the position of Professor in the Department of Physics and Mathematical Physics in July 2003.
