Sir Godfrey Henry Oliver "Geoff" Palmer (9 April 1940 – 11 June 2025) was a Jamaican-British academic and human rights activist who was professor emeritus in the School of Life Sciences at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland. Palmer discovered the barley abrasion process while he was a researcher at Heriot-Watt University under the guidance of Anna Macleod. In 1998, Palmer was honoured with the American Society of Brewing Chemists Award of Distinction, considered the "Nobel Prize of brewing". In 1989, he became the first black professor in Scotland, becoming a professor emeritus after he retired in 2005. He was knighted in the 2014 New Year Honours.
Early life Palmer was born in St Elizabeth, Jamaica, on 9 April 1940. His father left home when Palmer was seven years old; afterwards his mother moved to work as a dressmaker in England in 1948, part of the Windrush generation. Palmer grew up in Kingston, Jamaica, in the care of his eight aunts. Palmer joined his mother in London in March 1955, shortly before his 15th birthday, living at a house on the Caledonian Road. He told the story as a student at Heriot-Watt University that he was a stowaway on a banana boat from Jamaica to London. Too young to work, he was assessed as educationally subnormal at his first school, and he was sent to Shelborne Road Secondary Modern. His cricketing skill gained him a place on the London Schools' cricket team, and a place at Highbury Grammar School. After leaving school in 1958 with six O-levels and two A-levels, in Botany and Zoology, he found a job as a junior laboratory technician at Queen Elizabeth College, London University, working for Professor Garth Chapman. He gained further qualifications studying one day a week at a local polytechnic. In 1961, Palmer studied at the University of Leicester, earning a degree (2:2) in Botany in 1964. He sought post-graduate work, and applied to study for an MSc degree at the University of Nottingham, funded by the Ministry of Agriculture, but he was unsuccessful at interview.
Academic career After an interview with Professor Anna Macleod, in 1964, he secured a place to study for a PhD degree in grain science and technology jointly with Heriot-Watt College and the University of Edinburgh, beginning his doctorate in 1965. His doctoral supervisor at Edinburgh was the chemist Edmund Hirst. After completing his PhD thesis titled Ultra-structure of cereal grains in relation to germination in 1967, he began his research work at the Brewing Research Foundation in Surrey in 1968, where he worked on the science and technology of barley. He eventually became a senior scientist at the foundation before he moved back to Heriot-Watt University in 1977. After the Nigerian government banned the importation of European malt and barley in the 1980s, Palmer advised the government on the uses of local grains. He received a Doctorate of Science in 1985, and was offered a personal chair at Heriot-Watt in 1989 after Macleod had retired. Palmer specialised in grain science and had extensive expertise with barley, sorghum, other cereals and malt, having written a textbook on the subject titled Cereal Science and Technology. He investigated the processes that turn barley into malt, and he invented the barley abrasion process while at the Brewing Research Foundation. At Heriot-Watt, he and his students worked on brewing using sorghum. He developed a new simple method to detect pre-germination in cereal grains showing difference in amylase actions of individual grains of a barley sample containing different degrees of pre-germination, with results that can be expressed in optical density. In the journal International Brewer and Distiller, it was reported that Palmer had "requested samples of pre-germinated grain as he is developing a new amylase test which will look at the distribution of the enzyme across individual grains in a sample. A small number of grains, with high amylase/pre-germination activity, can cause unexpected storage or processing problems and visual or average analyses do not always identify uneven distribution." He attracted and received funding to set up the International Centre for Brewing and Distilling at Heriot-Watt University, through initiating contact with the distilling industry. He also contributed to the Encyclopedia of Seeds and the Encyclopedia of Grain Science, writing the foreword for the latter. On 29 April 2021, it was announced that Palmer had been appointed the Chancellor of Heriot-Watt University, for an initial term of five years. The role was central to promoting Heriot-Watt's prominence and profile in research in the university's campuses in Scotland, Malaysia and Dubai.
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