Professor Richard Blaikie

Governance Representative Board Member

June 2017 – present

Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research and Enterprise)

University of Otago

Biography

Professor Richard Blaikie, former Director of the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology, currently holds the role of University of Otago’s Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research and Enterprise).

After graduating with a first class honours degree in Physics from the University of Otago in 1988, Professor Blaikie was a Rutherford Memorial Scholar at the University of Cambridge, where he received his PhD in Physics in 1992. He also spent a year as a visiting scientist at the Hitachi Cambridge Laboratory. He returned to New Zealand to take up a position at the University of Canterbury in 1993.

Richard was the Deputy Director of the MacDiarmid Institute from 2002, succeeding Sir Paul Callaghan as Director in 2008.

Internationally, he is perhaps best known for his scientific work on the negative refraction of light and its use in fabricating tiny electrical circuits.

As well as formerly sitting on the Marsden Fund Council, Professor Blaikie was a foundation member of the Science Board established by the New Zealand Government. He was awarded the T K Sidey Medal by the Royal Society of New Zealand in 2001 and the Hector Medal in 2013, and was also a Fulbright Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2001. Professor Blaikie’s role as Deputy Vice-Chancellor also comes with a Chair in Physics to ensure that he is able to continue to make strong contributions to MacDiarmid Institute research programmes.