Like most academics, my fate was sealed during my PhD: I fell in love with research and vowed that it was what I would do until retirement.

I am very fortunate to have been able to largely pursue that early ambition – but it did not happen in quite the way I had originally envisaged. In those days, I expected to stay working in the same research field, in which I was becoming expert, and I was also sure that I would do my utmost to avoid any of those “nasty administrative jobs”.

But career paths don’t always turn out as planned. Almost 15 years after completing my PhD, I made what to some might seem a surprising decision and moved into a completely different and, to me, largely unknown research area.

My PhD at Queen Elizabeth College and subsequent research in London was on brown fat and body weight regulation – or trying to understand how some animals and some people stay lean with little effort or conscious control. I was seemingly one of the “lucky ones” who barely gained a pound during overeating experiments. Working with Mike Stock, my PhD supervisor and then collaborator, we showed that “diet-induced thermogenesis” (an increase in metabolic rate) could be activated when food intake increased, and in animals this was because brown fat burned off the extra calories.

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I became quite well known in the field, so when I moved to Manchester in the late 1980s I was keen to build my own independent career but in broadly the same area of research. So I tried to understand whether thermogenesis and brown fat played a role in the weight loss that accompanies serious injury and disease – when it can often be life-threatening. This topic fitted well with research in the University of Manchester’s North West Injury Research Centre and with the work of a newly appointed lecturer in the lab next door who worked on stroke.

With the great help of having a research fellowship and many talented collaborators, the work went well. I got to the point of testing whether an immune protein called IL-1 was the cause of high metabolism after a stroke and showed that a blocker of IL-1 did indeed prevent the raised metabolism and weight loss. But then, in one of those final experiments you do before submitting the paper (knowing that eagle-eyed reviewers will ask about it), we checked that the IL-1 blocker was directly preventing the metabolic responses and that it didn’t somehow reduce the brain damage. The findings took us by surprise. It turned out that it did reduce the extent of brain damage – dramatically – after a stroke. From that point my career changed.

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The paper was accepted with significant interest and we went on to repeat the experiments in various different ways. I filed a patent through the university to use the IL-1 blocker in various brain diseases, but then came a hard choice. Should I stay in my field of expertise – metabolism and physiology – or move into the completely new world of stroke and neuroscience? With enthusiasm and great naivety, I chose to do the latter.

It wasn’t quite as hard as I had thought. I had to go back to reading undergraduate textbooks and catch up on a huge literature (and even today I still feel I have fundamental gaps in my knowledge of neuroscience). But it wasn’t as though I had switched from biology to physics – I truly admire those who do. Perhaps the hardest thing was having to pay to attend international conferences on stroke as a delegate when previously I had been a lead invited speaker with all expenses paid at the major conferences on metabolism.

But while there were downsides, there were so many unexpected advantages. This was an area of research about which I had no preconceptions and that was liberating. I was utterly unconstrained by past thinking in the field of stroke and this meant that I could be bolder (or more foolhardy, perhaps) than I would have been in a field in which I was considered an “expert”. I have researched this area ever since.

Of course, this is not the only new turn I have taken during my career. Being a vice-chancellor was most certainly never part of my career plan.

I was a student again - isn’t that fun? They pay me to learn and discover. It is an ideal job. It has been a fascinating game

In 2004, I was happily working as a Medical Research Council research professor, focused on understanding how inflammation contributes to brain damage and getting involved in clinical trials to test the IL-1 blocker.

It was a significant year for the University of Manchester – the year in which Alan Gilbert was appointed as president and vice-chancellor of the “new” university (the Victoria University of Manchester had just merged with the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology). Because I was enjoying my research, when Alan offered me the post of vice-president for research I quickly declined – but I eventually succumbed to persuasion, and I am very glad that I did. It was fantastic to have oversight of research in every discipline in the university. I never imagined that I would benefit so much from having gained a (low) grade in A-level art so many years earlier; it gave me a little credibility with our staff in the humanities.

The second major change of my career came in 2010, when I was appointed vice-chancellor. As when I changed research fields, I did as much research about it as possible, reading avidly about leadership and universities, seeking advice from anyone I could persuade to talk to me, and listening to many inspirational people from within and far beyond higher education. I learned and I am still learning from great leaders in widely diverse fields.

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The skills you need to be a successful researcher and teacher are also invaluable in taking an administrative lead in a university. What always fascinated me about research and teaching was understanding and tackling problems, working with teams, communicating what you do, self-criticism and challenge, and the awareness that there is always much more to learn. The role of vice-chancellor involves and requires all of these things.

Nearly three years on, I think I have one of the best jobs in the world. It involves so many stimulating new experiences and challenges. I am also very fortunate that I am still permitted to spend some of my time on research – although in reality I depend on my senior research colleagues to do all the hard graft, while I have the joy of contributing to ideas, discussing results and having input into papers, grants and presentations – in other words, all the most enjoyable bits.

As a researcher for the majority of my working life, I have unexpectedly found that many of the lows and highs in my role as vice-chancellor have involved students. The hardest part of the job hasn’t been dealing with student protests, adverse press or a rare case of staff misconduct, but speaking to and trying to support the parents of a student who died. The best part has been seeing students from some of the most disadvantaged backgrounds succeed; one who won the annual prize told me that he missed part of his first year while he completed a prison sentence, while others have overcome unbelievable disability. But I also have to include attending the Nobel ceremony at the invitation of our two physicists who won the prize in 2010 as one of the high points. Unfortunately, though, it wasn’t an entirely comfortable one: in my haste I packed odd shoes, so I had to wear two left feet throughout the ceremony and banquet.

As for the research, I still have aspirations and hope for a major breakthrough that will allow our past discoveries to make a real difference to stroke sufferers. But it’s unlikely that I’ll manage another major change in research direction at this stage in my career.

I feel lucky to have been able to have immersed myself in two different research areas and I think it would be much harder to make a similar switch today. Yet the ability to change path must be encouraged and supported: we need more flexibility in funding and in career opportunities to allow for the unexpected. In research, “serendipity” is so often the driver of real innovation. Funding models should recognise this. We need to make it easier for staff to move out of their “comfort zone” and to take on new challenges.

Like moving home, moving jobs can seem like a huge task and it can be stressful, but it is usually very rewarding. After all, as one of my senior colleagues puts it, “if you always follow the beaten track you may well find that all the grass has already been eaten”.