Brian Harrap

Completing his PhD in Chemistry at the University of Melbourne in 1949, Brian first joined CSIR as a Research Officer with the the Division of Industrial Chemistry. He resigned from that position in 1950 to take up a Zinc Corporation Fellowship at Cambridge Returning to Australia in 1952, with another PhD, he took up a position with the Biochemistry Unit of the Wool Research Laboratories, later to become the Division of Protein Chemistry.

From 1952 to 1966 Brian was engaged in studies which gained him an international reputation, of the structure and properties of solubilised wool proteins and of mechanisms of dyeing wool.

In 1966 he became leader or the leather research section in the Division and his research changed to the study of the structure of collagen and the interaction between chrome tanning agents and collagen.

In 1971, Brian transferred to the newly constituted Division of Food Research as an Assistant Chief in the Division and more particularly Officer-in-Charge of the Dairy Research Laboratory.

After seven years at Highett, Brian again moved, this time to Canberra to the position of Deputy Officer-in-Charge of tile Centre for International Research Cooperation (CIRC). It was from ClRC that Brian retired and with his wife Ruth, moved to Pambula Beach on the New South Wales south coast.

Source

Adapted from a submission by Charles Pearmain to CoResearch, CSIRO’s staff newsletter (no. 270, April 1982), p. 5