Excited Students paying keen attention, while also having fun

On Tuesday, April 15, 2025, the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering’s Resource Recovery Lab’ had the pleasure of hosting around 50 Year-11 high school students from across New Zealand as part of the Faculty of Engineering and Design’s Women in Engineering Holiday Camp.

The students got hands-on experience with chemical engineering, extracting essential oils from lavender flowers using supercritical CO₂ and making their own lavender-infused hand sanitisers to take home!

Big thanks to our amazing PhD students (Marc Lewis, Pie Tangtrakulcharoen, Mima Mihajlovic, Negar Aghili, Snehanath, Indhuja Devadas, Homam Jalili and Naveen Tharmarajah) as well as Ray Hoffmann and Matthew Sidford for running the sessions and to the Women in Engineering team at the Faculty of Engineering and Design at the University of Auckland for organising such an inspiring event.

We hope to see many of these bright minds become the next generation of female chemical and materials engineers!