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Leiper was born in 1881 in Kilmarnock; his father died from tuberculosis when Robert Leiper was 14 which affected him greatly turning him to medical science rather than clinical practice; educated at Warwick School and Mason University College, Birmingham , he proceeded to Glasgow where he held a Carnegie Research Scholarship; graduated MB, Ch.B (Glasgow), 1904, and was employed in studying the helminthic material (relating to the study of parasitic worms) brought back by the Scottish Antarctic Expedition. A year later Patrick Manson recruited him to direct the newly created Department of Helminthology in the new tropical school. In 1907 he proceeded to Cairo to study under Professor Looss, a famous helminthologist in the University of Cairo and took part in the Egyptian Government's helminthological survey in Uganda. There he shot elephants and described several new species of intestinal nematodes from this great pachyderm. In 1909 he served as helminthologist to the Grouse Diseases Enquiry Committee and identified the parasite, Trichostrongylus pergracilis, as the cause of the disease. Leiper became University Professor, 1920 and Courtauld Professor of Helminthology and Director of the Department of Parasitology, London School of Hygiene and tropical Medicine.
He remained connected to the School until his death in 1969; in the early years at the School he travelled extensively, making essential contributions to the knowledge of a number of helminths and their life-cycles, he founded the Journal of Helminthology in 1923 and began planning the Institute of Agricultural Parasitology at Winches Farm near St Albans. Active long after normal retirement age Leiper was acknowledged by colleagues as the man who put helminthology on the map in the twentieth century.