Merrison, Alec, Sir, 1924-

Alexander Walter Merrison was born in Wood Green, London on 20 March 1924. He attended Tottenham Grammar School and then Enfield Grammar School, before going on to King's College London (which had been evacuated to Bristol during the Second World War) where he graduated B.Sc. with First Class Honours in 1944. Merrison's first appointment was as an Experimental Officer working on radar at the Signal Research and Development Establishment, Christchurch, Hampshire 1944-1946. In 1946 Merrison joined the Atomic Energy Research Establishment, Harwell, as Senior Scientific Officer where he began research in nuclear physics and developed some of the earliest neutron spectrometers. He remained at Harwell to 1951, when he moved to the University of Liverpool as Leverhulme Fellow and Lecturer (Ph.D. 1957). Here he changed the direction of his research and began work on elementary particle physics, a discipline beginning to flourish with the development of proton synchrotron machines. He continued this line of research for the next ten years at Liverpool and CERN, where he was Senior Physicist 1957-1960. Merrison returned to Liverpool in 1960 to take up the Chair in Experimental Physics, holding this post to 1969. In 1962 Merrison was also appointed the first Director of the new Daresbury Nuclear Physics Laboratory, where he was responsible for the construction of the 5 GeV electron synchrotron ' NINA '. The Laboratory was officially opened in 1967.

In 1969 Merrison left Liverpool to become Vice-Chancellor of the University of Bristol. Although he initially intended to serve for ten years, he held the post to 1984. During his term of office, he presided over many changes in University structure and funding and oversaw a considerable expansion in size, although towards the end of his tenure he was faced with the need to make controversial reductions in some departments as the government reduced its funding of higher education.

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