Our research areas
Functional Nanostructures
Imagine what you could create by combining the natural genius of biology with the latest advances in technology? Think of nature-inspired nanobots seeking out and destroying disease, bone implants that grow themselves and handheld sensors that can instantly diagnose cancer.
Materials for Energy Capture and Utilisation
Our investigators are exploring novel ways to capture and store energy and to absorb greenhouse gas emissions. The goal is to take new energy solutions to the nation and the world to help create a more sustainable future.
Read more about Materials for Energy Capture and Utilisation
Tomorrow's Electronic Devices
This theme is about predicting what tomorrow’s devices might need in terms of research, then undertaking that research today. We also work with industry to enable them to adopt and adapt this latest research. The potential in New Zealand’s High Value Manufacturing (HVM) sector is vast and we are tapping into that potential.
Featured news & events
April 29, 2021
Techweek 2021: Deep Tech – Creating a boost for the NZ Economy
Our annual Techweek event is aimed at enhancing connections between our researchers and a range of i...
Read more about Techweek 2021: Deep Tech – Creating a boost for the NZ Economy
May 14, 2021
To 2028 and beyond – zero carbon, low energy computing, zero waste - towards a sustainable Aotearoa
Our new research programmes will address some of the greatest challenges facing New Zealand today.
MacDiarmid Institute
New Zealand's best scientists, engineers and educators, unified for a common goal: to make, understand, and use new materials to improve people's lives.February 20, 2019
Video transcript
The challenges facing New Zealand and the world today - clean water, renewable energy, climate change - will be solved by tomorrow's scientists and engineers - sitting in our classrooms right now, ready to be inspired. They need new materials and new technology based on those materials that haven't been discovered yet.
That's what the MacDiarmid Institute does. We are New Zealand's best scientists, engineers and educators, unified for a common goal: to make, understand, and use new materials to improve people's lives.
What is materials science
MacDiarmid Institute investigators discuss how materials science and nanotechnology can solve the big problems of our time.May 8, 2019
Video transcript
Associate Professor Nicola Gaston: Can you imagine a future where electricity is practically free, where there's clean water available for everyone and a simple blood test taken at home can help diagnose some diseases?
The technology that can make each of those things possible is based on materials science. Materials are all around us; this coffee cup, this table, even this sugar I might put in the coffee. When we make things really small, as we do in nanotechnology, we create a material that has most of its substance at the surface. With sugar, that means it dissolves quickly. But in general what it means is that we can control the properties of that material with great precision. So we can take a material, any material - it could be a metal or it could be plastic - and we can play with the surface and give it new abilities. For example, we could make it anti-bacterial or we could make it absorb more light.
The MacDiarmid Institute is a network of New Zealand's best materials scientists. Materials science is the basis of all high-tech manufacturing, including sustainable environmental innovations such as new solar cells or carbon capture technologies for climate change mitigation. We work with existing industries and we also spinout new companies. In the past 15 years we have spun out 16 new companies.
Dr Ray Thomson: One of the really exciting things that the Investigators at MacDiarmid are working on is across this whole climate change area. Sequestering carbon dioxide, improving the efficiency of photovoltaic cells through to really advanced battery storage.
Associate Professor Nicola Gaston: If we want that future, a materially sustainable future, where everyone around the world can have clean water, personalised medicine, free electricity, we need materials technologies. In the MacDiarmid Institute we bring materials scientists together and we partner with industry to create intellectual property, jobs and wealth for New Zealand.
About us
We are a network of committed biologists, chemists, physicists and engineers who collaborate to develop innovations that will both solve big problems and boost the New Zealand economy.
What we do
Our research is creating new technologies to aid the transition to a more sustainable way of life and make our world a better place.
Our partnerships
We have ongoing partnerships with community groups, museums and other organisations to help us take science out of the lab to make it accessible, exciting and inspiring.
Check out our latest research
Price, M. B., Lewellen, K., Hardy, J., Lockwood, S. M., Zemke-Smith, C., Wagner, I., Gao, M., Grand, J., Chen, K., Hodgkiss, J. M., Le Ru, E. & Davis, N. J. L. K. Whispering-Gallery Mode Lasing in Perovskite Nanocrystals Chemically Bound to Silicon Dioxide Microspheres. The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters 11, 7009–7014 (2020).
Qazvini, O. T., Macreadie, L. K. & Telfer, S. G. Effect of Ligand Functionalization on the Separation of Small Hydrocarbons and CO2 by a Series of MUF-15 Analogues. Chemistry of Materials 32, 6744–6752 (2020).
Aqrawe, Z., Patel, N., Vyas, Y., Bansal, M., Montgomery, J., Travas-Sejdic, J. & Svirskis, D. A simultaneous optical and electrical in-vitro neuronal recording system to evaluate microelectrode performance. PLoS ONE 15, e0237709 (2020).
Motshakeri, M., Phillips, A. R. J., Travas-Sejdic, J. & Kilmartin, P. A. Electrochemical Study of Gold Microelectrodes Modified with PEDOT to Quantify Uric Acid in Milk Samples. Electroanalysis (2020).
Mallett, B. P. P., Chong, S. V., Guehne, R., Chan, A., Murmu, P., Kennedy, J. & Buckley, R. G. The electronic properties and defect chemistry of Bi2-xSe3, –0.05<x<0.15. Journal of Physics and Chemistry of Solids 148, (2021).
Governale, M., Bhandari, B., Taddei, F., Imura, K.-I. & Zülicke, U. Finite-size effects in cylindrical topological insulators. New Journal of Physics 22, Art. No. 063042 (2020).
Meet our people
Dr Michel Nieuwoudt
Associate Investigator
My current research focuses on extracting knowledge and insight from complex materials using spectroscopy and chemical data analysis.
Professor Alan Kaiser
Emeritus Investigator
I am interested in the meeting place between theory and experiment. What would be the next experiment to try?
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