MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology
The MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology is a New Zealand Centre of Research Excellence specialising in materials science and nanotechnology. It is hosted by Victoria University of Wellington, and is a collaboration between five universities and two Crown Research Institutes.
Background
The Centres of Research Excellence initiative was set up in 2002 to allocate contestable New Zealand government funding through the Tertiary Education Commission to collaborative research groups. At the time the funding was announced, two materials science research groups were putting together competing bids.One, based at the University of Canterbury, was the Nanostructure Engineering, Science and Technology group. They had already received a Marsden grant in 1998 and run a 2001 workshop on semiconductor nanostructures in Queenstown attended by Nobel Laureate Klaus von Klitzing. Their bid, titled "the New Zealand Centre for Nanoengineered Materials and Device Research", was led by Richard Blaikie and included researchers Maan Alkaisi, Simon Brown, Steve Durbin and Roger Reeves.The second bid, put forward by Paul Callaghan and Jeff Tallon at Victoria University of Wellington, was titled "The MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials". At a meeting at the Curator's House restaurant in Christchurch in 2001 the two groups agreed to join forces and put forward a joint proposal, drawn out out on a table napkin, for the "MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology Research", named at the insistence of Callaghan after Alan MacDiarmid, a New Zealander who had won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2000. Callaghan representing Victoria University was to lead the CoRE, and Richard Blaikie from UC was to be deputy director.
The bid was successful, and the MacDiarmid Institute was formed on 1 July 2002, as a collaboration between Victoria University, the University of Canterbury, the University of Otago, Massey University, GNS Science, and Industrial Research Ltd; later Callaghan Innovation and the University of Auckland were included.
Although living in Philadelphia, Alan MacDiarmid was a strong supporter of the institute named after him: he adopted a mentoring role and regularly visited the Institute with his wife Gayl Gentile. The day he died, on 7 February 2007, he was due to fly to New Zealand to attend the MacDiarmid's third Advaanced Materials and Nanotechnology conference.
Governance and funding
The first five Centres of Research Excellence shared an initial $60m fund between them: a one-off capital expenditure of $20m, and $40.6m over four years. In 2009 the MacDiarmid Institute received an anonymous bequest of $1 million to support postgraduate research into nanotechnology.Research
The Institute divides its work into four research areas:- Towards Zero Waste – Reconfigurable Systems
- Towards Zero Carbon – Catalytic Architectures
- Towards Low Energy Tech – Hardware for Future Computing
- Sustainable resource use – Mātauranga Māori Research Programme