He was a cross-appointed research officer at the National Institute for Nanotechnology (NINT) for a decade. Prof Harrison earned an Honours B.Sc. in Chemical Physics from Simon Fraser University in 1980, receiving the Gordon Shrum Gold Medal upon graduation.

He was the recipient of a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada Post-Graduate Fellowship while undertaking graduate studies in Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has held appointments as a Visiting Researcher or Professor at NASA in the USA, CNRS in France, and Dublin City University in Dublin.

He has published over 170 scientific manuscripts, is the recipient of numerous awards, grant funding of over 30 million dollars over his career, and is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Prof Harrison received grant funding from Alberta’s agencies, Canada’s NSERC, the USA’s DARPA, and various corporations for work on microfluidic systems and biosensors for bio-agent and point of care monitoring. He served on the Program and Steering Committees of several international conferences, and was appointed to the Editorial Advisory Boards of Analytical Chemistry, Lab on a Chip, and Electrophoresis.

He sits on the Advisory Board to NASA’s Microdevices Lab, a division of JPL.