In May we had a visit from Chemmat graduate Reece Oosterbeek, who is in the midst of an exciting PhD program at Cambridge University. Reece received a prestigious Woolf Fisher scholarship to undertake doctoral studies at the Department of Materials Science and...

Congratulations to Dr Geran Zhang – Chemmat grad who completed a PhD at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Geran visited the department in May with the good news that he has not only completed his PhD at MIT, where he was on a full scholarship...

Each year the department ‘facilitates’ a mixer, organised by the Year Three students, that brings both staff and students of the department for an evening of casual mixing. The aim of this annual event is to foster a sense of collegiality and camaraderie amongst all...

By Thomas Chong, CHEMMAT student On the 10/5/2019, the groovy crew of CMESA visited the Urbanauts Brewery for a day of “educational” sampling and exposure to what a chemical and materials engineering degree can offer. After the overwhelmingly positive response from...

The Chemmat PG students organised a potluck on 24th May 2019 to enjoy a meal in observation of the day’s breaking of fasting during the Ramadhan period. Both Muslim and non-Muslim staff and students brought a variety of dishes and shared the food amongst much...

Chemmat’s Teaching and Learning Committee, chaired by A/P Peng Cao,  is working to achieve Chemmat’s strategic goals relating to teaching and learning. In order to reduce the number of red-flagged courses, the Committee is working closely with...

Paula Steinmetz (nee Ah Kuoi) was the first Pasifika woman in New Zealand to study chemical and materials engineering. She’s now a senior engineer at Auckland’s Watercare. Read about Paula’s journey...

Two of our past graduates Rosie Sargisson and Jeff Fong have opened their own bakery in New Plymouth. Read about their journey here

The department enjoyed celebrating the success of our graduates, both undergrad and postgrad, as they marched onto stage at the Aotea Center to collect their hard-won certificates. All the best to all graduates!

In May this year, Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) published a commissioned review of the scientific literature on high pressure processing (HPP) to address validation expectations for HPP as a control measure for the inactivation of food borne bacterial...

On Thursday, 21 and Friday, 22 March a group of 56 students and three staff from the University of Auckland visited Methanex NZ Ltd to provide practical experience on a live plant.  This visit is organised every year by Robert Kirkpatrick and Harvey Weake who are both...

Last week we had a visit by Peter Slane, a Chartered Engineer and Fellow of the Institute of Chemical Engineers (IChemE) and a former graduate of our department. In 2012, Peter joined IChemE as Director of Australasia to oversee the operations of both the Australia...

Earlier this year Chemmat lent a hand to the Civil & Environmental Department to help clean up a significant chemical spill incident in their laboratory. Although this was a team response, it met the threshold to be nominated for an award in the Health, Safety...

Dr Mansouri being introduced by Prof Brent Young at the seminar.   On 7th March 2019, the department held a seminar where invited academic Dr Seyed Soheil Mansouri, from the Technical University of Denmark, gave a talk on his work Towards Development of Virtual...

Post Graduate Lunch The department hosted our post-graduate students to a modest lunch. This was an opportunity for the diverse groups of PG students to mix and mingle, together with staff, and build collegiality.     Persian New Year Nowruz or Persian New Year...

On the 26th of February 2019, the department held a workshop among academic staff members to generate and capture group discussions on (1) Traditional forms of research impact, and (2) Non-traditional forms of research impact. This whole-day workshop was held at the...

The 2nd International Symposium of Materials, Manufacturing Processes and Devices (MMPD2019) was held in the Science Building at the University of Auckland, New Zealand from 15–17 February. The conference was organized by the University of Auckland, and co-organized...

Peng Cao attended the 148th TMS Annual Meeting held in San Antonio, USA, from March 10 – 14, 2019. He presented an invited talk in the “Solidification Processing of Light Metals and Alloys: An MPMD Symposium in Honor of David St John”. During the four-day conference,...

Congratulations to 1990’s Chemmat alumni Agnes Loheni for having been sworn in as a National list MP. Click here to read Agnes’s Wikipedia page and here to read her parliamentary...

Battery technology is a science hot-spot around the world. Multimillion-dollar research companies in the United States, China, Japan and Europe are racing to find the next big capacity boost to overtake the current front-runner – lithium-ion batteries. In New Zealand,...

Chemmat’s Senior Lecturer, Dr Jenny Malmström was invited to speak in the biomaterial surfaces and interfaces session at the Pacific Rim Symposium of Surfaces, Coatings and Interfaces. The conference was held at the Waikoloa Beach Marriott Resort and Spa, Hawaii, from 2-6 December, 2018. Jenny spoke about work from her group functionalising proteins with iron particles as well as their efforts in using block copolymers to create functional biointerfaces. Her talk was received well, probably partly due to the open bar at the rear of the lecture hall!

Apart from the plenary lecture and few selected talks, Jenny mainly attended the ‘bio-session’, which was very relevant to her research area. Two of these bio-sessions were devoted to celebrating 35 years of NESAC/BIO and showcased high profile speakers who are or have been associated with this centre over the last 23 years. Highlights included talks by Sally McArthur (Swinburne, AUS), Tobias Weidner (Aarhus, DK), Buddy Ratner (Washington) and David Castner (Washington). The conference also included sessions on energy harvesting and storage, nanomaterials, plasma processing and thin films. There was one plenary lecture, given by Mauricio Terrones on defects in 2D metal dichalcogenides and their effects on the material properties.

The IEEE EMBS fourth biennial Conference on Micro and Nanotechnology in Medicine was held in Kauai, Hawaii from 10-14 December 2018. Chemmat’s Head of Department, Assoc Prof Ashvin Thambyah attended the meeting at which the “biomedical grand challenges facing our society” were addressed at “the scale of biology with Micro and Nanoscale technologies.”

At this ‘Gordon Conference’ style meeting, top researchers from the universities such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford, Berkeley, and Wisconsin presented their career journeys in developing new technologies for diagnostics, therapeutics, enhancement of physiological function, disease management, or early monitoring and prevention.

Tejal Desai from UCSF, by using micro and nanostructured materials was able to modulate the therapeutic microenvironment and enhance both implant performance and the host response.

Erkin Seker of UC Davis similarly was able to tune mass transport of biomolecules by controlling the multiscale morphology of miniaturised devices.

In the wearable sensors field, Wei Gao (not to be confused with our very own Wei Gao) from Caltech, showed his latest advances in sensing physiology, based on his earlier work where he developed sensors that could measure in real-time a range of important metabolites, including glucose, from sweat!

Ashvin also had the opportunity to meet one of the invited speakers, Professor Lim Chwee Teck, who, like many of the speakers at the conference, has an impressive research track record that includes high-level science publications as well as commercially successful research enterprises. His nature-published work on capturing circulating cancer cells is directly related to a clinical and commercial application that has recently been listed on the stock market as an initial public offering.

Prof Lim has kindly accepted an invitation to visit Auckland this year and will give a couple of seminars. He will also discuss with university staff members on future research ideas and collaborations.

In September/October last year, Chemmat Senior Lecturer, Dr Filicia Wicaksana hosted Prof William Krantz (Emeritus Professor & President’s Teaching Scholar) from the Department of Chemical & Biological Engineering at the University of Colorado. During his...

Chemmat students and staffEach year the department offers approximately 70 research projects to our Part IV students. Each student conducts his/her independent research under the supervision of a staff member. Some of the projects are part of large research...

International journal Biointerphases has released a special issue highlighting women in Biointerface Science. Chemmat’s Senior Lecturer, Dr Jenny Malström features on the cover with other international researchers. The editorial showcases the careers of these women...

Engineering research at the University of Auckland attracted more than $2M in funding from 2018’s Marsden Fund, a significant increase over 2017. Congratulations Assoc Prof Peng Cao, Dr Shanghai Wei and Prof Mark Taylor for their research grant wins: –         ...

Congratulations Chemmat PhD student, Hongzhou (Andy) Zhang (supervised by Assoc Prof Peng Cao) for winning best poster prize at the 2018 World Congress on Powder Metallurgy. The conference was held in Beijing, China from 16-20 September, 2018. When asked about the...

The Food and Health Programme and University of Auckland Business School’s Graduate School of Management co-hosted a visiting group of 25 MBA students from Stanford University, USA in December 2018. The visiting students were in New Zealand to understand how...

The Federation of Māori Authorities (FOMA) held its 31st annual conference in Gisborne, from 2-3 November, 2018. FOMA is an organisation that was established in 1987 and provides the voice of Māori businesses to government and other authorities. Each year FOMA gathers...

On 25 October 2018, Part IV students and staff gathered at Old Government House to celebrate the culmination of four years of hard work and the end of their undergraduate degree. It was an extremely happy evening, kicked off with a hilariously true-to-form speech by...

On 7 January 2019, the department welcomed a visit by Dr Nazmul Karim, Professor and Head of the Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering Texas A&M University, and Holder of the Michael O’Connor Chair II. We were delighted that Prof Karim (Naz) found some...

During Semester II 2018, a group of Part IV students, spearheaded by Adam Cameron and Ellie McBurney, began brewing beers in the Park Ave food lab. The project was designed as a hands-on learning experience, to support theoretical process knowledge learnt during Part...