My husband, Niall Logan, who has died aged 70 of pulmonary fibrosis, was an expert on bacillus, a genus of rod-shaped bacteria with more than 250 named species that has many uses, including as an industrial enzyme, in food production, the making of detergents and in DNA research.
One of his main contributions to the field was to help with the scientific classification (taxonomy) of bacillus, work that helped with the development of testing systems that can identify the various species.
As a professor at Glasgow Caledonian University he was awarded a personal chair in bacterial systematics and was invited to lecture on the subject around the world. He also conducted research in Antarctica at the Italian base at Terra Nova Bay, working on the microbiology of geothermal soils around Mount Rittman. In 2020 a newly identified genus, Niallia circulans, was named by Canadian researchers in his honour.
Niall was born in London to William, a sales director for a company that made electronic instruments, and Eileen (nee Rogers), a radiographer. He was educated at City of London Freemen’s school in Surrey and then Dover college in Kent.
After obtaining a first-class degree in microbiology from the University of Surrey, he did a year of postgraduate study at the University of Bristol before accepting a post as a lecturer in microbiology at Glasgow College of Technology, which later became Glasgow Polytechnic and then Glasgow Caledonian University. He remained as a lecturer and researcher there for the rest of his working life. His book Bacterial Systematics (1994) is a standard undergraduate text on the taxonomy of bacillus.
We married in 1977, and lived for four decades in a rare survival of a Scottish longhouse in Balmore village, East Dunbartonshire. He spent much of his time outside work researching the history and construction of the house, and was a member of the Scottish Vernacular Buildings Working Group, which he later chaired and for which he organised conferences, field trips and working parties. He also joined the board of trustees of the Auchindrain open air museum, a preserved Scottish farming township.
With his friend Paul Bishop, Niall set up and ran a successful local history group in their parish of Baldernock. Both academics, they were much in demand as speakers and applied their research skills to great effect in the field of local history studies.
Niall was also a skilled landscape painter, exhibiting and selling his paintings at Resipole Studios art gallery on the Ardnamurchan peninsula, and a keen music lover and reader. An enthusiastic hill walker, he conquered many Munros in Scotland, always accompanied by one or more of the 11 Cavalier King Charles spaniels he owned over the years.
He is survived by me, our four children, Flora, Cordelia, Victoria and William, and seven grandchildren.
