Australian Fulbright Alumni Association 

It is with sadness that we advise members of AFAA of the death on 28 November 20016 of Emeritus Professor Howard Bradbury.  Professor Bradbury was a founding member of the Australian Fulbright Alumni Association and served as its Treasurer from 1989 to 2004.  He was one of four members of the Alumni Association awarded Life Memberships in 2007.  These were the first Life Memberships awarded since the inception of the Association in 1989.  The awards were made to three of the founding members of the Association - Prof Bob Crompton (founding Vice President), Dr Howard Bradbury (founding Treasurer), and Dr Dale Hebbard (founding Secretary) as well as Mrs Janet Flint who was a highly dedicated and long-standing Secretary of the NSW chapter.  Bob and Dale were presented with their Life Memberships by the US Ambassador at a reception at the US Embassy in November 2007, while Janet was awarded her Life Membership by Mrs Harriet Fulbright at the US Consul General’s residence in Sydney in December.

The following slightly edited information is taken from a biography produced by the ANU Research School of Biology (http://biology.anu.edu.au/people/howard-bradbury). 

Professor Bradbury studied chemistry at Melbourne Technical College and Melbourne University followed by a PhD in polymer chemistry at Birmingham University. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University, he worked at CSIRO Wool Research Laboratories and then moved to the Chemistry Department at the Australian National University (ANU) in 1961. He had sabbatical appointments at Cornell University and on three occasions at Oxford University. His major research interests during this period were the chemistry of wool and keratin fibres and subsequently NMR studies of proteins, enzymes and carbohydrates. He was awarded a DSc and the David Syme Research Prize by Melbourne University, the Rennie Memorial Medal and H G Smith Memorial Medal by the Royal Australian Chemical Institute and a DSc by ANU.

Professor Bradbury took early retirement in December 1988 from teaching and research in chemistry, and since then continued to work on konzo and other health problems due to cyanogens present in cassava. In 2007 he was awarded the inaugural "$2 a day award" by the Institution of Chemical Engineers for the discovery of the wetting method. In 2007 he was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia.