Critical Minerals, Material Solutions - Tauranga (17 August)

Event details

The topic for this year’s MacDiarmid Institute Lecture Series is Critical Minerals, Material Solutions. The world wants minerals, but scientists around Aotearoa are working on what we could make to use instead.

In association with Café Scientifique Tauranga, join us in Tauranga on 17th August, when Nicola Gaston and Joseph Nelson will discuss critical minerals - raw materials that are essential to many existing and future technologies and have been making headlines in recent times due to increasing supply chain vulnerabilities. Nicola and Joseph will present materials science solutions that are being developed and utilised right now, in Aotearoa New Zealand, to recycle, replace or reduce our need for critical minerals.

Professor Nicola Gaston is Professor of Physics at the University of Auckland, and Director and Principal Investigator at the MacDiarmid Institute. Nicola’s research focuses on conducting quantum-mechanical simulations of the electronic and thermodynamic behaviour of nanoscale materials. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society Te Apārangi and awarded the Thomson Medal in 2023 for her contributions to low-temperature liquid metals research and leadership in New Zealand’s research, science and innovation sector. She also served as President of the New Zealand Association of Scientists in 2014–15.

Dr Joseph Nelson is a Research Scientist at Lincoln Agritech and Associate Investigator with the MacDiarmid Institute. Joseph completed an MSc in Physics at the University of Auckland and a PhD at the University of Cambridge. After postdoctoral research roles in the UK and Japan, Joseph returned to New Zealand and has been a Research Scientist at Lincoln Agritech since 2021. Joseph's research interests are in new materials characterisation using density-functional theory (DFT) and computational structure prediction.

Registration is required. Please register here via Eventbrite.

Not in Tauranga? We're also hosting this event in Hawke's Bay (7 September), Wellington (16 September), and Christchurch (end of September).

Otherwise let us know where you'd like us to visit next!