MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology

The MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology (often simply called the MacDiarmid Institute) is a New Zealand Centre of Research Excellence (CoRE) 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

Alan MacDiarmid 2005

The Institute is named after Alan MacDiarmid, a New Zealander who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2000. It is funded by the New Zealand government through the Tertiary Education Commission.

The Institute divides its work into four research areas:^[1]

• 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

Awards

From 2004 to 2007, the MacDiarmid Institute sponsored the annual Young Scientist of the Year awards for up-and-coming scientists and researchers in New Zealand, organised by the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology.^[2][3] These awards replaced the FiRST Scholarship Awards, and have subsequently been replaced by the Prime Minister's MacDiarmid Emerging Scientist Prize.^[2][4][5][6]

Young Scientist of the Year

Year	Winner	Research area	Notes
2004	unknown
2005	Jessica North	environmental contamination from leaky landfills	[3]
2006	Claire French	cell identification technology	[7]
2007	Jessie Jacobsen	Huntington's disease	[7]
2008	unknown

Directors

	Name	Term	Notes
1	Paul Callaghan	2002–2008	[8]
2	Richard Blaikie	2008–2011	[9]
3	Kathryn McGrath	2011–2015	[10]
4	Thomas Nann	2015–2018	[11]
5	Nicola Gaston / Justin Hodgkiss	2018–	[12]

Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology conference

The MacDiarmid Institute runs a biennial international conference on advanced materials and nanotechnology (AMN). This conference series was conceived of by Alan Kaiser, a founding member of the Institute, who chaired AMN1 in 2003 in Wellington.^[13] AMN11 was held in February 2025 for the first time in Christchurch, at Te Pae conference centre. It featured research on mechanobiology, quantum computing, and carbon-free iron production; Nobel Laureate Moungi Bawendi gave a public talk attended by over 650 people.^[14][15]

See also

• Cather Simpson
• Alison Downard
• Catherine Bishop