Timothy S. Harrison, professor emeritus of surgery and cellular and molecular physiology in the Penn State College of Medicine, died peacefully on July 21 at his home in Rumford, R.I. Born in India into a missionary family, his father, Paul Wilberforce Harrison, was a missionary physician committed to serving the population in the Middle East. Until the age of 12, he was raised in Muscat, Oman, attended boarding school in India and, in 1939, returned to the United States to attend high school in Holland, Mich. After serving two years in the U.S. Navy, he matriculated into the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. His general surgery training occurred at the Johns Hopkins University and the Massachusetts General Hospital.
From 1959 to 1960 he served as a special research fellow at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, working under the direction of U.S. von Euler, Nobel Laureate in Medicine in 1970. At Karolinska, he developed a keen interest in catecholamine biochemistry and physiology, which proved to be his lifelong research passion. After serving for one year as an instructor at Yale University, he assumed his first academic position as assistant professor of surgery at the University Of Michigan School of Medicine and rose to the rank of professor in 1971. In 1975, he took a position at Penn State College of Medicine as a professor of surgery and of cellular and molecular physiology.
Harrison retired in 1994, at which time he was appointed professor emeritus. He and his wife, Eliza, and moved to Rumford, R.I., in 2007 to be closer to their nuclear family.