Photo: A/P Kevin Free, 31/1/1932 – 23/5/2021   Kevin Free was an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering from 1986 until 2000 when he retired at the age of 68. After completing his undergraduate studies in Chemical Engineering at the then Canterbury College, a constituent college of the University of New…

Photo: Morgan Dolfing  

Photo: Dr Harshpreet Singh   We are excited to share that the NZ Product Accelerator team won the Velocity Innovation Challenge 2021 under the UN Sustainable Development category led by Dr. Harshpreet Singh. The venture (H2OQUAL) aims to develop a sensitive, low-cost, and point-of-care sensing water quality monitoring system. The system will be mass-producible, which…

Akash Kaushal M B, a master’s student from Professor Mohammed Farid’s group won the New Zealand Aluminium Smelters Masters Prize in Engineering, awarded to recognise excellence in the field of Engineering. Akash worked on the project titled ‘High Pressure Processing in Infusion and Gelatinization: An application on Rice’. The research work was focused on retention…

Photo: CHEMMAT alumni Dr Farzam Shahni   Dr Farzam Shahni completed comprehensive research in control and automation with a specialization in process monitoring. His research was an industrial project in the Industrial Information and Control Centre (I2C2) at the University of Auckland. Farzam developed and established a novel method to evaluate the performance of industrial…

Photo: CHEMMAT PhD candidate, Mohamed Dabbour   Mohamed Dabbour was nominated as representative for the University of Auckland for the ‘IChemE Postgraduate Researcher of the Year.’ Mohamed’s research entails integrating reservoir simulation with process modeling to allow for the creation of digital twins of geothermal fields. This has allowed for optimisation in the running of…

When CHEMMAT’s Dr Amar Auckaili and Prof Mohammed Farid were looking for a talented student engineer to work on their novel thermal storage heat exchanger, they were fortunate that Omar Mustafa was assigned to the project. Omar who had already proved his excellent academic ability with his undergraduate coursework, was now able to apply his…

Photo from the left: Professor Anthony Phillips from Biological Sciences, CHEMMAT’s Dr Michael Hodgson, CHEMMAT PhD candidate Yixuan (Jennifer) Wang, CHEMMAT’s Professor Wei Gao Yixuan (Jennifer) Wang Thesis title: Electrospun silicon oxycarbide fibre mats and its composites: Fabrication and properties Supervisors: Professor Wei Gao, Dr Filicia Wicaksana       Xiaoyu Yue Thesis title: Titanium…