Ian Bryson

Ian Bryson was born and brought up in the old village of Cumbernauld.

He was a chemistry undergraduate at Stirling from 1974 to 1978. He obtained a 1st class honours degree and was awarded the first Professor William Parker Memorial medal for an outstanding student. The medal was in honour of the late Professor Parker, head of Chemistry at Stirling who had sadly died prematurely in 1977.

Ian obtained a Carnegie scholarship to undertake a PhD under Dr James Roberts on the Biomimetic Rearrangements of Humulene which he completed at Stirling . He stayed at Stirling for several more years working on post doctoral plant chemistry projects  before taking up his first industrial post researching synthetic collagen products with Devro Ltd, at that time part of Johnson and Johnson Ltd . Ian's other passion was colour chemistry and he spent many years working for Ciba-Geigy Ltd, the Swiss pharmaceutical and chemical company, developing  new technology in the areas of pigments, inks and paints. One of his successes was the red colour found on many luxury cars. On returning from Switzerland to the UK Ian focused on modernising the  manufacturing of the synthetic ultramarine pigment originally known as 'Dolly Blue', used to enhance whites in laundry and occurring naturally as the  stunning blue coloured Lapis Lazuli. 

Ian died  in 2013 aged 56 whilst developing his vision of a green chemistry company, Verdex Ltd, creating plant derivatives as an alternative to petrochemicals  for the specialist intermediates  used in  the chemical industry, the basis of which originated from his PhD research and his post-doctoral work at the University of Stirling many years before. It is hoped that his legacy will be that this technology will be brought to market in the future by the company which took over the project.

Ian's wife, Aileen adopted a lime tree in memory of Ian.