Brian Morris

Brian James Morris (born 14 July 1950) is a professor emeritus of molecular medical sciences at the University of Sydney, Australia. Education and appointments Brian Morris grew up in Adelaide, South Australia, where he graduated from the University of Adelaide in 1972. He then completed his PhD at Monash University and the University of Melbourne in 1975. From 1975–1978 he did postdoctoral research at the University of Missouri, and the University of California, San Francisco, first as a CJ Martin fellow, and then as an Advanced Fellow of the American Heart Association. He was then appointed as an academic at the University of Sydney in 1978, was appointed a professor in 1999, and was appointed Professor Emeritus in 2013. He retired in 2014 and the Bosch Institute of Medical Research took over his lab space. Career Morris studied the Renin–angiotensin system (RAS) for most of his career. His interest in RAS began during his undergraduate studies, when he worked for a while in the laboratory where Eugenie Lumbers had just found early clues to the existence of prorenin (the protein precursor of renin) during her PhD work. He remained interested in the field, and had the good fortune to move to the University of California, San Francisco in the mid-1970s, a center for the development of the tools of biotechnology and molecular cloning. He joined others in applying those tools to RAS, and was among the pioneers is isolating the gene for renin itself, along with the prorenin and kallikrein genes, and the cardiac myosin heavy chain gene. He and his team were among first to elucidate the biosynthetic pathway of renin, as well as key molecular mechanisms in renin's transcriptional and posttranscriptional control. Taking that work further, he helped pioneer the field of genetic variation in hypertension.