Research profile

Professor Roy M. Harrison

Looking back at the main career-related decisions in his life, Roy Harrison has to admit that few, if any of them, were made with much planning or even forethought; most of them were made because they seemed to be the obvious thing to do at the time. This is especially true of his decision to take a degree in chemistry, even though he has now moved a long way from the mainstream of the discipline, it is a decision he has never regretted for a moment.

Home life

Not a city dweller by origins or inclination, Harrison lives some 20 miles out of Birmingham on the edge of a small town called Stourport-on-Severn where with his wife Susan he manages a “garden” of some four and a half acres which includes a small flock of sheep, some hens, geese and ducks. They are accompanied by their son Edmund, aged 10, and intermittently by son Tom (24 years), daughter Polly (22) and stepsons Andrew (24) and Alistair (22). Domestic life is never dull!

Early years

Born near to Reading, England in 1948, Harrison went to the local high school, Henley Grammar School which was located in the town famous for its rowing regatta, although this was not an event in which the School participated. Subject choices were then much more limited than nowadays, and having passed a range of O-level subject examinations at aged 14, he chose to do science A-levels which effectively determined that he would study physics, chemistry and maths for the last two years of high school. Leaving school aged 16, he was too young to enter University and spent a year as a laboratory technician for ICI, then entering the University of Birmingham to read chemistry in 1966, graduating with First Class Honours in 1969. Having enjoyed the course greatly, and the social life even more, the obvious thing was to stay on for a PhD, and Harrison joined the research group of Dr John D. Hobson working in the field of organic reaction mechanisms. At that time the opportunities for career posts in organic chemistry were fairly limited, so on completion of the PhD in 1972, Harrison decided to pursue his interest in environmental matters through a successful application for a postdoctoral appointment in Public Health Engineering in the Department of Civil Engineering at Imperial College, London, working in the research group of another Birmingham Chemistry graduate, Dr (later Professor) Roger Perry. This was an important period because not only did it provide access to a whole new area of science, Roger Perry's entrepreneurial management style gave invaluable insights into how to support a substantial research group. After two years postdoctoral work on atmospheric lead pollution, Harrison applied successfully for a Lectureship in atmospheric chemistry at Lancaster University. There, he joined the Department of Environmental Sciences which had been in existence for less than 10 years (the age of the University at that time) and was struggling to generate research of international quality. Thankfully now, almost 30 years on, that battle has been emphatically won and the department rates highly for its research both nationally and internationally. Benefiting from an initially fairly light teaching load, Harrison quite rapidly developed lines of research in air pollution, atmospheric and water chemistry.

After some ten years at Lancaster, having built a sizeable research group, family reasons dictated a move to the south of England and Harrison was appointed as a Reader and subsequently Director of the Institute of Aerosol Science, based in the then Department of Chemistry at the University of Essex in Colchester. There, he developed new lines of work on atmospheric aerosols and combustion aerosol as well as research on the chemistry and air/surface exchange of atmospheric nitrogen compounds. Disappointed by a lack of promotion, in 1991 he moved to the newly created Queen Elizabeth II Birmingham Centenary Chair of Environmental Health at the University of Birmingham, a position which he holds to this day. Having held the position of Director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Health at the University for a number of years, he is now Head of the Division of Environmental Health and Risk Management which is a component part of the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences.

From atmospheric chemistry to environmental health

Harrison's academic career has evolved from atmospheric chemistry, to aerosol science, to environmental health, which for him implies primarily air pollution. As his academic responsibilities have evolved, so his research has gradually evolved in line with them. Harrison's postdoctoral work had been concerned primarily with developing a technique to make measurements of alkyllead compounds in the atmosphere. In his post at Lancaster, this work evolved into a much broader study of the environmental pathways, including the atmospheric chemistry of tetraalkyl, trialkyl and dialkyl lead compounds. This would not have been complete without a parallel study of inorganic lead including its environmental speciation which was a major focus of interest for a number of years, including work on the atmosphere, freshwaters and the solid earth. Whilst the primary focus was on lead, many measurements were made also on other environmentally relevant trace metals. Stimulated by emerging work on the long-range transport of photochemical ozone pollution in western Europe, Harrison developed research on tropospheric ozone which led subsequently to his appointment as a member of the Department of Environment Photochemical Oxidants Review Group, then chaired by Dr (now Professor) Dick Derwent which was his first contact with the evaluation of scientific results in support of government policy development.

Aerosols

Harrison's subsequent post at the University of Essex had been created specifically to continue fundamental research on aerosols, led until that time by Professor C N (Norman) Davies. Davies was a physicist of the old school whose only requirement for quite sophisticated experiments appeared to be string and sealing wax, and other than a borrowed Nolan-Pollack counter, the laboratory was essentially devoid of aerosol equipment. The modest budget made available by the University was soon used up in purchasing equipment for chemical analysis, and lines of work were pursued relative to the then highly topical issue of acid deposition, with a particular focus on nitrogen rather than sulfur compounds.

A major opportunity was presented by the presence of a co-ordination office within the department for the SCOPE (ICSU Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment) ENUWAR (Environmental Consequences of Nuclear War) programme, which was under the leadership of Professor Sir Frederick Warner and involved some of the leading atmospheric scientists from around the world. This provided a tremendous opportunity to learn about the effects of aerosol on the atmosphere, the strengths and limitations of global circulation models, which were then being used to predict the likely outcomes of massive injections of smoke into the atmosphere, and to develop new lines of experimental research on the optical properties of carbonaceous aerosol. This work led Harrison into an enduring interest in the chemical and physical properties of atmospheric aerosol in the context of climate modification. In his view, this research project played a very major role in ending the cold war by convincing the politicians in both eastern and western bloc countries that a full-scale nuclear war was effectively unwinnable as it would render the planet largely uninhabitable. During a SCOPE ENUWAR workshop held in Moscow in 1988, the group travelled to Chernobyl, being probably the first international group to tour the locality subsequent to the nuclear disaster.

Environmental health and urban air quality

On moving to the University of Birmingham in February 1991 to a Chair initially endowed by Birmingham City Council and highly unusually bearing the name of Queen Elizabeth II, Harrison found himself in the position of being in control of a Masters course in Environmental Health which admitted its first students in the April of that year. Despite a fluctuating national demand for environmental health training the course has gone from strength to strength ever since. At the same time there was a renaissance of government interest in the United Kingdom in issues of urban air quality. At that time, almost the only advanced air pollution monitoring was for photochemical oxidants, which took place in rural areas to identify patterns of long-range transport, etc. Knowledge of the urban air pollution climate was quite rudimentary and the Department of Environment sought expert scientific advice by establishing the Quality of Urban Air Review Group (QUARG) which Harrison was appointed to chair. He chaired the Group from 1991 to 1997 during which time it produced detailed reports on Urban Air Pollution in the United Kingdom, Diesel Vehicles and Urban Air Quality and Airborne Particulate Matter in the United Kingdom. The First Report was influential in shaping the future form of urban air quality monitoring in the UK for the next decade whilst the Second Report, which proved highly controversial with the motor industry, has played a part in stimulating ever-strengthening legislation on emissions from diesel vehicles. The Third Report set the foundations for a quantitative understanding of the sources of airborne particulate matter in the UK atmosphere. Subsequent to the 1997 general election and the development of a well-defined National Air Quality Strategy in the UK, Harrison was invited to chair the Airborne Particles Expert Group which reviewed the sources of airborne particulate matter and set the basis of methods used to this day in the UK for source apportionment of this key pollutant. In parallel with the work in chairing these committees, funding became progressively more available for research on urban air quality and Harrison's research group worked in a number of areas, particularly in elucidating the causes of extreme winter episodes of nitrogen dioxide pollution which were up to that time unexplained by atmospheric chemical knowledge and more substantially, work was funded by a range of sponsors on atmospheric particles, their sources, atmospheric properties and effects.

Airborne particulates

Airborne particulate matter is the pollutant currently attracting the greatest attention in international research, and most probably responsible for the greatest public health impact of any air pollutant. Whilst Harrison's initial work was primarily focused on the physico-chemical properties of airborne particles and their use in source apportionment, he subsequently became a collaborator in epidemiological studies of the health effects of particles and in work with toxicologists studying the effects of particles in in vitro systems. Nanoparticles (defined as less than 50 nm diameter) have been a particular focus of attention and Harrison is proud to be one of the discoverers of the fact that the major proportion of nanoparticles in engine exhaust arise from nucleation processes subsequent to emission as opposed to formation within the engine itself. Recently, he has been funded to develop instrumentation to study the nucleation process itself. During this time, reflecting his interests in the health effects of pollutants, Harrison has been a member for over ten years of the Expert Panel on Air Quality Standards of the (now) Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, which has been a world leader in recommending health-based guidelines for air quality, and a member of the Department of Health Committee on the Medical Effects of Air Pollution for almost ten years. He now feels almost as much at home discussing the effects of air pollutants as their physico-chemical properties.

Chemical incidents

During the 1990s, the opportunity arose to set up a Regional Service Provider Unit advising the National Health Service in the UK on the effects and management of so-called chemical incidents, which are releases of chemicals into the environment. Harrison became a founder and Co-Director of the Chemical Hazard Management and Research Centre based at the University of Birmingham, providing advice to Directors of Public Health across the entire West Midlands area. This activity has recently been absorbed into the Health Protection Agency, newly formed by the government to combine expertise on chemical, microbiological and radiological hazards into a single agency. Whilst this relieves Harrison of a management role, he still acts as a consultant to the Health Protection Agency. This wider interest in the health and environmental effects of chemicals has led him to membership of the government's Advisory Committee on Hazardous Substances which feeds advice to the Chemicals Stakeholder Forum, itself designed to instigate risk management measures for chemicals liable to cause environmental problems. As yet, this activity, whilst generating many requests for advice, has yet to generate much in the way of original lines of research, although the potential is great.

Current positions and research interests

Currently, Roy Harrison is Head of the Division of Environmental Health and Risk Management at the University of Birmingham,in which he heads a group of academic staff with research interests primarily in the field of environmental chemistry and pollution, and which manages and teaches a suite of Masters courses within the broader environmental health field. His own research group of around ten people focuses especially on the properties and health effects of airborne particulate matter, including the application of new techniques such as aerosol mass spectrometry. He is also currently deeply engaged in providing policy support advice to government and the Environment Agency on issues relating to waste management and the comparative impacts of different waste management options, such as landfill and incineration.

Roy Harrison was a member of the Earth and Environmental Science Panel of the government's 2001 Research Assessment Exercise, which has given him a very wide overview of environmental science research in the UK. Whilst very strong in international terms in many areas, in Harrison's view the subject is quite seriously under-funded. Certain aspects are particularly disappointing; amongst these are the lack of strong support mechanisms for younger academic staff attempting to establish an independent research reputation, and the very low rate of success of responsive mode grant applications (around 20% in environmental science in the UK), which is appallingly wasteful of scientific effort. Looking back on 30 years of work in UK universities, it is clear that the demands on academic staff at all levels have increased greatly over this period. Nonetheless, Harrison remains a compulsive researcher and still gets enormous satisfaction from seeing research ideas come to fruition. There are two specific aspects of his career that give particular satisfaction. He was delighted to be awarded the accolade of Highly Cited Researcher by ISI Thompson Scientific when they analysed citations in the environmental science/ecology field. Having co-authored over 300 papers, it is nice to know that someone actually reads them! Perhaps more importantly, Harrison derives immense satisfaction from the success of many of his PhD students and postdoctoral workers who have gone on to achieve success in academic life, international agencies, government agencies or consultancy. As to the future, there remains a great deal of mileage in the field of airborne particulate matter, be it as it relates to human health effects or global climate issues. Perhaps more immediately, and drawing on his broader interests, Harrison hopes to develop new lines of research aimed at reducing the terrorist threat by improving understanding of the pathways of pollutants in complex urban systems. He is also fascinated by the theme of quantitative risk and would like to develop methodologies not based on economic metrics for comparing risks associated with different processes (e.g. for waste disposal), different pollutants or different management practices. The ultimate would be to develop policy decision support systems based on objective criteria, and the best available science.

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