He was one of the two co-chairs of a research programme funded by the European Science Foundation (ESF) on Cosmology in the Laboratory (COSLAB) which ran from 2001 to 2005. He was previously the coordinator of an ESF Network on Topological Defects in Particle Physics, Condensed Matter & Cosmology (TOPDEF). These programmes studied the analogies between topological defects in the early universe and similar structural defects in liquids and solids, which may be studied in the laboratory. (For a simple example of a network of laboratory topological defects, consider the boundaries between the many small, misaligned crystallites in a metal.)