The MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology: a New Zealand Centre of Research Excellence

The MacDiarmid Institute is a New Zealand Centre of Research Excellence, established in 2002 to draw together some of the disparate activities in these fields. It is named after Nobel prize-winner, Alan MacDiarmid, a New Zealander who brought his scientific insights and vision to the Institute during the first five years of its existence. We review the brief history of the Institute here, putting it in the context of the New Zealand scientific research environment, and outline the activities that are being undertaken in its six research Themes: Nano-engineered Materials and Devices; Electronic and Optical Materials; Molecular Materials; Soft Materials; Inorganic and Hybrid Materials; and The Intersection Of Nanoscience and Biology. This research is distributed amongst approximately 40 Principal Investigators at five New Zealand universities and two Crown Research Institutes (CRIs), and involves a significant amount of international collaboration. Funding is largely through the New Zealand Ministry of Education, so there is a strong emphasis on training graduate students and increasing the public awareness and uptake of nanotechnology research.