Kelsey Atangamuerimo Harrison is an emeritus professor of obstetrics and gynaecology and former vice-chancellor of University of Port Harcourt, who contributed immensely to studies of maternal health, especially during pregnancy.
He was also part of a group that discovered the dangerous threat posed by sickle cell disease to maternal and fetal lives among Africans.
In Zaria, the results of the work of a team he led, became the most powerful boost to international advocacy for better maternal and perinatal health in developing countries.
Another group to which he belonged, unraveled the influence of several haemoglobinopathies on pregnant women and their babies under African conditions, and how best to deal with the most dangerous of them, namely sickle cell disease.
In Zaria, his collaborative studies on malaria in pregnancy discovered that protecting early teenage pregnant girls against malaria and anaemia conferred a hitherto unknown benefit: the protected girls grew taller, they produced bigger babies, yet the proportion of those of them who developed cephalopelvic disproportion and needed operative delivery, fell sharply.
Between 1976 and 1979, Harrison and his colleagues collected data on over 22,000 births that when analysed threw open the problems of traditional forms of interference, of adolescent marriage and pregnancy, of women's inferior status, and of their neglect in pregnancy, labour and afterwards, and of the consequences of this neglect especially high levels of both maternal mortality and VVF.
The strongest message that came through this work was that both maternal and perinatal health benefitted hugely when women were educated, but not when they were illiterate.
In the 1970s, it was the rehabilitation of sections of the health care services of the Rivers state of Nigeria, destroyed through military operations in the country's civil war.
As part of the post-civil war rehabilitation effort, he helped to ensure that displaced students of Eastern Nigeria origin were reabsorbed back to their former places in university of Ibadan.
He earned the Doctor of Medicine degree of University of London in 1969 with a thesis on Blood Volume in Severe Anaemia in Pregnancy.
He regularly played cricket to a high standard in Ibadan and London and subsequently for Nigeria in the 1950s and 60s as opening batsman and wicket keeper.