After working for Unilever Research for almost thirty years at Port Sunlight and for a short time at Bangalore, Peter Garrett retired, acquiring visiting professorships at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom and briefly at Rice University, Houston, Texas. He has worked on various aspects of interfacial science in a career lasting 40 years. These included the equilibrium and dynamic adsorption behavior of surfactant solutions, solubilization in microemulsions, kinetics of surfactant dissolution and mesophase growth, and of course both the basic science of defoaming and its application especially in the detergents industry.

Professor Garrett is author or coauthor of more than 30 journal articles and is named as inventor on 14 patents, the majority of which concerned the application of antifoam technology. He is also editor of the book Defoaming, Theory and Applications published in 1993. A member of the Royal Society of Chemistry, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom in 1971.