Born in 1920, Doreen Langley attended Warnambool High School. She was a boarder at Melbourne Church of England Girls Grammar School and then resided at Janet Clarke Hall while studying at the University of Melbourne.

Miss Langley graduated in Science with majors in Biochemistry and Microbiology, then spent a year at Royal Melbourne Hospital while she studied for her Graduate Diploma in Nutrition. Her first job was with Sir MacFarlane Burnet at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute. After a short term as a junior dietitian at Sydney’s Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, she returned to Melbourne as a dietitian with the 4th General US Army Hospital. This was followed by service in the WAAF. In 1947 she was a member of a survey team sent by the Australian Government to study food production, storage, preparation and consumption in Papua New Guinea, and the following year she undertook a survey on groundnuts in Gambia, West Africa. From 1951-53 she worked as a nutritionalist for the South Pacific Health Service.

In 1957 she accepted the position of Principal of the Women’s College. The College expanded greatly during her tenure: Reid wing was opened in 1957, and during the next 12 years the Langley wing was built, Williams wing was extended and the Menzies Common Room built Ð altogether enlarging the College threefold. On her retirement, Miss Langley started a new academic interest and career by studying criminology and scoring a distinction in Forensic Psychiatry. She was Publications Officer (part-time) for the Institute of Criminology, and her involvement with the Australian Institute of International Affairs took her to Russia, Cambodia, Burma and China. She died in May 1998 after a long illness.