Ant was awarded a Swedish Research Council-funded Assistant Professorship at Stockholm University in Sweden, and was a Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Research Fellow. While in Sweden he was part of the Swedish Astrobiology Network and was founding faculty in the Stockholm University Graduate School in Astrobiology. He returned to New Zealand
to take up a position at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, where he was awarded a Royal Society of New Zealand Rutherford Discovery Fellowship. He joined the University of Auckland in 2017. Ant is interested in the origin and evolution of molecular and cellular systems. His lab currently uses a mix of computational and experimental methods, including experimental evolution and synthetic biology, to study the evolutionary origins of processes such as RNA editing, translation initiation, and the evolution of DNA itself, for which he was awarded Marsden Funding in 2017.