On 8 May 2019, the Chemical and Materials Engineering Student Association (CMESA) hosted a student internship evening. They reported a great turnout, with both Part 2 and 3 students. The evening consisted of Part 3 and 4 students that spoke about their experiences...

The Chemmat Knit – Newsletter June 2019   Dear Colleagues The June 2019 issue has been an interesting one to put together. For me, it helped capture the natural diversity, of the many attributes, that the Chemmat family and spirit embodies. From world-class...

  “The ‘call for climate crisis action’ is supported by me and many other NZ scientists,” says Chemmat’s Dr Jenny Malmstrom.   Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern says the Government is not opposed to declaring a national climate emergency. Read...

May 2019 – Dr Saeid Baroutian and Professor Brent Young together with the Technical University of Denmark Chemical and Biochemical Engineering (Prof Krist Gernaey, Dr Seyed Soheil Mansouri and Dr Isuru Udugama) successfully held the 1st intercontinental workshop...

Photo From Left: Chemmat’s Dr Saeid Baroutian, PhD Candidate Subhasree Bhasker, Des Mataga and Alan Routley from AUEA, Head of Chemmat, Associate Professor Ashvin Thambyah   About the Awardee: Subhasree Bhaskar is a Doctoral Candidate at Chemmat. Subhasree...

Photo: Chemmat PhD Candidate, Misagh Ebrahimpour   Each year, the Velocity Innovation Challenge is held to encourage the University’s staff and students to share venture ideas to solve problems. The Faculty of Engineering is well represented in 2019’s...

Food comes in all shapes, sizes and textures. And now you can print your own food. Chemmat has recently obtained a Foodini 3D Food Printer. The Foodini works on the principle of food paste extrusion and has the capability to print five different food materials within...

  It was an exciting and delicious week in Christchurch. The New Zealand Food Safety Science & Research Centre (NZFSSRC) Annual Symposium and the New Zealand Institute of Food Science and Technology (NZIFST) Conference was held back-to-back in Christchurch...

  From left: Hugh Barlow, Leeju Kim, Stephanie Laycock, Kayla Fairbairn, and Hank Lloyd Beer brewing has started up again at Chemmat! The photo above was taken at the first brew group meeting while Chemmat’s Senior Technicians, Ray Hoffman and Peter Martin...

Photo From left: Brian McMath, Anthony Meyer, Shanghai Wei, Sudip Ray, Micheal Pervan, Jinjing Liu, Mark Jones, Mark Taylor, André van Haaren, Monique Bateman, Karnika De Silva, Harshpreet Singh   On 18 June NZ Product Accelerator celebrated the continuation of...

Photo: Chemmat student Claire West in London   The following is a report from Claire West, who won a bursary to attend the Student Energy Summit (SES) in London. The Student Energy Summit (SES) is a unique bi-annual conference that brings together students from...

In order to increase the coverage of department research, we are launching ‘Paper of the Month’. Each month, we will collect journal articles that have been published by staff members, as highlighted by our Google Scholar Alerts, and an ad hoc committee of a few...

  Enginuity day is an annual event organised by the Women in Engineering, University of Auckland to inspire young women to consider careers in engineering and to discover what it is like to study engineering at the University of Auckland. This year, the event was...

  The health care sector may be as bad as the aviation industry when it comes to greenhouse gases and pollution. The anaesthetic gases released every year by one New Zealand hospital have the carbon footprint of 500 return flights between New Zealand and London,...

  What happens when high pressure is applied to food and drink? If a domestic pressure cooker is used, the result might be a classic pot roast or a trendy smokey beef brisket. Both are good eating and achieved with about two atmospheric pressure, or roughly the...

Photo: Chemmat’s Dr Saeid Baroutian   Researchers at the University of Auckland have estimated that the anaesthetic gases released by one hospital annually in New Zealand have the carbon footprint of 500 return plane journeys between New Zealand and London....

Photo: Chemmat’s Professor Mohammed Farid   Professor Farid often depicts the pressure exerted in high pressure processing visually, as two elephants standing on a coin. The Ministry for Primary Industries recently approved the use of high pressure...

On 15 July 2019, staff members and friends came together to celebrate the career of Professor John Chen, and wish him all the best for his retirement years commencing 1 Aug 2019. Current Head of Department Associate Professor Ashvin Thambyah welcomed guests and gave a...

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 24^th 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 merriment.

From the pictures you will see the delightful array of food prepared – and even bought from the famous Auckland Indian restaurant – Paradise!

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 Chemmat’s Staff/Student Consultative Committee (SSCC) to ensure all issues in relation to teaching are addressed timely.
• The Committee has proposed to introduce a new 180-point Master of Engineering Studies in Food Engineering in 2020. The proposal has gone through to the Academic Programme Committee for approval.
• The Committee is working to organise departmental teaching workshops.  The first workshop will be focused on developing good learning outcomes for each course.
• As part of teaching transformation, we are implementing two champion courses to make better use of the MDLS space. These two pilot courses will provide more feedback to other courses at a later stage.
• We have implemented a robust mechanism to minimise (ideally completely eliminate) errors in the exam papers. In doing so, we set up a number of quality control steps before the exam papers are submitted.

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...

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...

Our expertise offered a possible new solution for a problem Dr Keith Pine had been researching. A partnership between Dr Karnika De Silva of the NZ Product Accelerator and Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering, and Dr Keith Pine from NZ Prosthetic Eye...

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,...

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...

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...

The above photo was taken in the Chemmat Year 1 Microscope Laboratory in 2009 of some of the participants during a tour of the School of Engineering for their 20-Year Reunion. The Class of 1989 (Final year 1988, about 30 of them) are planning a 30-Year Reunion in...

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...