Simon works as an anaesthesiologist at Auckland City Hospital, a diving physician at North Shore Hospital (Auckland), and is Professor of Anaesthesiology at the University of Auckland. He is very widely published, particularly in his niche interest field of diving and hyperbaric medicine. From 2022 to 2025 (ongoing) he has been ranked the world’s leading authority on decompression sickness by Expertscape.com. He has review articles in Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine, and a chapter in the last four editions of Harrison’s Principles of Internal Medicine. Simon has a long career in sport, scientific, commercial, and military diving. He has participated in extreme shipwreck and cave diving expeditions spanning many years. For example, in 2002 he performed the deepest ever dive to a shipwreck at that time. Twenty one years later in February 2023 he was a member of an expedition to the Pearse Resurgence cave in New Zealand where a 230 m dive was conducted using hydrogen as a breathing gas for a deep rebreather dive for the first time. He was conferred Fellowship of the Explorers’ Club of New York in 2006, and was the Rolex Diver of the Year in 2015.
