Pauline Harrison


Pauline May Harrison is a British protein crystallographer and professor emeritus at the University of Sheffield.
She gained her chemistry degree from Somerville College, Oxford in 1948, followed by a DPhil in X-ray crystallography in 1952 supervised by Dorothy Hodgkin.
After 3 years at King's College London she moved to the University of Sheffield in 1955 as a demonstrator in the Biochemistry department, obtaining an MRC grant to study the iron storage protein Ferritin, publishing preliminary X-ray diffraction data in the 1st volume of the Journal of Molecular Biology in 1959. The molecule which became her life's work.
In 1978, she was awarded a personal chair and retired in 1991. In 2001 she was awarded a CBE for services to higher education.

Personal life

Harrison is the daughter of May and John Macqueen Cowan, Assistant Keeper of the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh. She was married to Royden Harrison, also a lecturer at Sheffield and a significant figure in the Labour movement until his death in 2002.