The Centres of Research Excellence initiative was set up in 2002 to allocate contestable New Zealand government funding through the Tertiary Education Commission to collaborative research groups. At the time the funding was announced, two materials science research groups were putting together competing bids.[1]
One, based at the University of Canterbury, was the Nanostructure Engineering, Science and Technology (NEST) group. They had already received a Marsden grant in 1998 and run a 2001 workshop on semiconductor nanostructures in Queenstown attended by Nobel Laureate Klaus von Klitzing. Their bid, titled "the New Zealand Centre for Nanoengineered Materials and Device Research", was led by Richard Blaikie and included researchers Maan Alkaisi, Simon Brown, Steve Durbin and Roger Reeves.[1]
The second bid, put forward by Paul Callaghan and Jeff Tallon at Victoria University of Wellington, was titled "The MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials". At a meeting at the Curator's House restaurant in Christchurch in 2001 the two groups agreed to join forces and put forward a joint proposal, drawn out out on a table napkin, for the "MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology Research", named at the insistence of Callaghan after Alan MacDiarmid, a New Zealander who had won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2000. Callaghan representing Victoria University was to lead the CoRE, and Richard Blaikie from UC was to be deputy director.[1]
Although living in Philadelphia, Alan MacDiarmid was a strong supporter of the institute named after him: he adopted a mentoring role and regularly visited the Institute with his wife Gayl Gentile. The day he died, on 7 February 2007, he was due to fly to New Zealand to attend the MacDiarmid's third Advaanced Materials and Nanotechnology conference.[2]
Governance and funding
MacDiarmid Instiute staff of the MacDiarmid Institute at the 2025 Annual Symposium. Back row: Kirsty Doyle, Kevin Sheehy, Gabrielle Holmes, Anna Garden, Vanessa Young. Front row: Pauline Harris, Rosie Wayte, Nicola Gaston, and Natalie Plank.
The first five Centres of Research Excellence shared an initial $60m fund between them: a one-off capital expenditure of $20m, and $40.6m over four years.[3] In 2009 the MacDiarmid Institute received an anonymous bequest of $1 million to support postgraduate research into nanotechnology.[4]
The MacDiarmid Institute runs a biennial international conference on advanced materials and nanotechnology (AMN). Its precursor, referred to by Richard Blaikie as "AMN0", was the 2001 semiconductor nanostructures conference in Queenstown organised by Simon Brown and Joe Trodahl.[1] The AMN conference series was conceived of by Alan Kaiser, a founding member of the Institute, who chaired AMN1 in 2003 in Wellington.[18] 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.[19][20]
↑Bain, Murray (October 2009). "Interview with John Watt"(PDF). MacDiarmid Young Scientists of the Year Awards Newsletter. Wellington: Foundation for Research, Science and Technology. p.1. Retrieved 5 January 2026.
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