Professor Furness is a leading authority on digestive physiology, especially the neural control of the digestive tract. He has been strongly involved in evaluation of therapeutic drugs and has run clinical trials of candidate drugs. He is currently the leader of a program to develop vagal nerve stimulation for the treatment of inflammatory bowel disease. This is projected for first in human trials in 2018.  He is one of Australia’s most highly cited scientists. He is best known for his work in analysing enteric nerve circuits and for developing the concept of neural chemical coding.