Jack Heslop-Harrison - Academic Life

Academic Life

After completion of his reports he was discharged from the army to work for Glaxo in penicillin production, but soon left to become a junior lecturer at King's College. A year later, finding it difficult to cope with an underfunded department, he moved to Queen's University in Belfast. The department was small, consisting of a professor, a lecturer and a second (part time) lecturer, and when Heslop-Harrison applied to take a PhD there was nobody qualified to supervise him. He acted as a guide at the 1949 International Phytogeographic Excursion where he met W. H. Pearsall, who before leaving offered him a place as a lecturer at University College London, with the understanding that he would be shortly made a Reader should everything work out.

He moved to UCL in 1950, becoming a Reader in 1953, but returned to Queen's in 1954. It was here he began spelling his name as Heslop-Harrison; with a colleague of his called Douglas Harrison letters were regularly delivered to the wrong person. He did not personally get involved in research, but regularly assisted other scientists with various papers and theses. He left Queen's again in 1960 to become a professor of botany at the University of Birmingham

At Birmingham the university was in the process of unifying its various biology departments in one School of Biological Sciences, something he oversaw and became Chair of in 1963. In 1967 he was awarded the Trail-Crisp Medal by the Linnean Society of London, and the same year became the first Chairman of the Institute of Plant Development at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In March 1970 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and delivered the Royal Society's Croonian Lecturein 1974. In 1970 he received an honorary degree from Queen's, something that was apparently prized more than others due to his history with the institution. He relinquished it in 1995 due to the increasing political instability in Northern Ireland.