About
Stephen has been writing for as long as he can remember. Or at least, for as long as he remembers holding a pen. Short stories and satirical plays and even verse in the style of fellow Mertonian EC Bentley flowed easily at school and university, not always to universal delight. Multilingual, he can be misunderstood in German, and possibly even French and Italian. In recent years he has led a class in German literature.
After leaving Oxford, Stephen went to medical school in London and subsequently continued training in general medicine, cardiology and neurology in which he specialized. As a neuroscientist, his research identified centres of representation of the heart within the brain, and the concept that cardiac control can be lateralized with different functions separated according to location on the right or left side of the brain. Continuing his writing, this time in the scientific arena, Stephen has published several hundred peer-reviewed papers and reviews on this subject, with research funded by the National Institutes of Health and the American Heart Foundation among others.
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To earn a living Stephen held faculty appointments in Neurology, Cardiology and Neurosurgery variously at Johns Hopkins University, Vanderbilt, and Pennsylvania State University.
A different form of creative writing presented itself when, following the death of his wife in 2020, the covid era struck. Unable to leave his flat and travel in the wider world, Stephen decided to bring the wider world into his flat. And so Mr. Pettibone paid a visit and with Stephen wrote the first in a series of mystery novels about people characterized by ‘self-directed morality.’ In interviews Stephen has said that he is fascinated not only by what people say, but what they leave unsaid. The influence of past experiences, and the scars these cleave and how they influence moral decision-making are a major theme of his work, and surface metaphorically in his writing.