Nick Maskell leads the Bristol Academic Respiratory Unit, consisting of a large team that develops and then tests translational work, providing an evidence base for improvements to patient centred respiratory care. His current H-index is 56 with over 14,000 citations. He has a total grant income of £8.9 million as Principal Investigator  and £43 million as Co-Principal Investigator.

He has a major interest in pleural disease, running a tertiary pleural disease service and chairing the regional mesothelioma MDT. He chaired the existing British Thoracic Society (BTS) pleural disease guidelines and is chairing the forthcoming one (2021). He is an advisor to Royal college of Physicians and the NPSA on patient safety related to pleural interventions. He is the West of England Respiratory lead for the CLRN and NIHR board panel member for commissioned calls. He had leading roles in both the BTS and European Respiratory Society (ERS) and sits on American guideline groups. He is a regular international invited speaker, speaking in over 60 countries over the past decade. He has been made a Fellow of the American Society of Chest Physicians and Fellow of the ERS. He is the chairman of the West Country Chest Society, regional adviser for the Royal College of Physicians and a previous associate editor of Thorax. He is also the Chair of Trustees for Mesothelioma UK.

He currently sits on the NIHR task and finish committee for Aerosol Generating Procedures (AGP), which then reports to SAGE. He is the Chief Investigator for AERATOR, one of the only non-therapeutic urgent public health badged COVID-19 studies in the UK. He leads the largest academic pleural research centre in the UK and established the Pleural Investigation Study in 2008, which now holds over 20,000 serum and pleural fluid samples from around 2,000 prospectively collected patients and is the largest repository of pleural samples in the world. This has enabled a broad range of research, including biomarker discovery and validation. In addition, he has led a number of phase I clinical trials in pleural disease, leading to RCTs.