It was a pleasure to have Year 10 students from Opunake High School, Cornerstone Christian School, Napier Girls High School and Central Hawkes Bay College visit the chemistry labs at Massey during November. The students did experiments involving refluxing blueberries and using the extract to prepare a small solar cell. We are grateful to Nessha Wise for her hard work leading events for high school students in our region.
We were delighted to welcome chemistry postgraduate students from VUW who visited Massey on 13 November for the annual Massey-Vic Symposium. Many thanks to Bruce Chilton and Vyacheslav Filichev for organising the symposium. Congratulations to the following prizewinners for their presentations:
- Best overall presentation: Brenda Luong (VUW)
- Best Victoria University of Wellington presentation: Zoe Atsalis
- Best Massey University presentation: Shivangi Chourasia
Congratulations to Ludwig Petters for successfully passing his PhD oral defence and for being placed on the Dean's List! Ludwig's thesis was titled, "Asymmetric catalysis via spatially separated chiral and catalytic motifs in multicomponent metal-organic frameworks." Essentially, he reimagined asymmetric catalysis in an entirely new way using MOFs as a platform material. Ludwig was supervised by Shane Telfer and funded by a Royal Society Marsden Fund grant, "Reinventing asymmetric catalysts using multicomponent MOFs" awarded to Shane.
Congratulations to PhD student Andre Buzas Stowers Hull who completed her confirmation of registration. Andre is working on streamlining surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy for aqueous systems, supervised by Mark Waterland.
We welcomed Szofia Schonberger who has commenced a PhD investigating the interfacial behaviour of plant proteins supervised by Catherine Whitby. Szofia is funded by the Riddet Institute Centre of Research Excellence, supported by Government to carry out fundamental and strategic research on food: https://riddet.ac.nz/
Congratulations to Vyacheslav Filichev who, together with Harikrishnan Kurup and Geoff Jameson, was awarded a Royal Society Marsden Fund Standard Grant to help support his research into cancer drugs: https://www.royalsociety.org.nz/what-we-do/funds-and-opportunities/marsden/awarded-grants/marsden-fund-highlights/2025-marsden-fund-highlights/keeping-the-pressure-on-in-the-second-half-shape-shifting-cancer-treatments-designed-to-prevent-drug-resistance/
