Gilbert Cockton was first appointed as Professor of Human-Computer Interaction in 1997 after appointments at Northumbria, Glasgow and Heriot-Watt Universities. In 2009, he became Professor of Design Theory at Northumbria. After retiring in 2019, he returned to Sunderland University on a part-time basis. He is co-editor-in-chief of ACM Interactions magazine and has had other senior roles in ACM, ACM SIGCHI, IFIP and the BCS Interaction Group. His work is highly cited, with 260 publications since 1985 and almost 250 invited presentations in 23 countries (including 14 keynotes). He has been involved in the supervision or examination of over 90 PhD students in Design, Computing and related HCI disciplines.