Cambridge stint changed physicist’s life

University of Otago physicist and deputy vice-chancellor Prof Richard Blaikie reflects on his...
University of Otago physicist and deputy vice-chancellor Prof Richard Blaikie reflects on his career. Photo: Linda Robertson.
Leading physicist and University of Otago deputy vice-chancellor Prof Richard Blaikie still clearly remembers the moment in 1988 when he was given the news that changed his life.

Born in Gore, Prof Blaikie grew up in Dunedin, attending Kaikorai Valley High School.

He had earlier completed a BSc (Hons) degree in physics at Otago when, in 1988, he was called to the university registry and told he had just received the one Rutherford Memorial Scholarship awarded throughout the Commonwealth each year.

The award, by the Royal Society of London, enabled him to study at the Cavendish Laboratory, in Cambridge, and he gained his PhD from Cambridge University in 1992.

Prof Blaikie also remembers the strong case that the late New Zealand physicist Prof Paul Callaghan made for a greatly expanded high-technology sector to boost the country’s export earnings.

Prof Callaghan was the founding director of the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology, and Prof Blaikie succeeded him as director. Prof Blaikie, who is Otago deputy vice-chancellor, research and enterprise, gave an inaugural professorial lecture this week, reflecting on his career in a talk titled "There and Back Again: Adventures with Atoms, Electrons and Light".

After his "quantum electron experiences" at Cambridge and an engineering focus at Canterbury, he was undertaking research on "nano-optics at the ‘new’ Otago".

He recalled that his Cambridge studies  ended his previous six-year part-time job on Saturdays at the Countdown supermarket in Mornington.

An Otago Daily Times article had marked his success that year with a "Goodbye, supermarket" headline.

After returning to New Zealand, he worked as a physicist at Canterbury University (1994-2011), the last three years as MacDiarmid Institute director, before taking up his Otago post.

The "good news" was that Prof Callaghan’s "high-tech" vision had already become a reality, strengthening the economy and adding to earnings from agricultural exports and tourism.

"New Zealand has a vibrant and strongly growing tech sector."

The country’s $10 billion-a-year tech industry recently grew by $1 billion in one year, and some other countries were interested in how this was being achieved, he said.

Dunedin-based tech firms were playing a growing role in the city’s future, and Photonic Innovations Ltd had spun off from university research, he said.

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