UC Professors’ Exceptional Contribution Recognised
Outstanding professors who have retired from the
University of Canterbury (UC) over the past year but
continue to contribute and inspire have been acknowledged at
a celebration event.
UC has appointed seven Emeritus
Professors in the last 12 months, including Alison Downard,
School of Physical and Chemical Sciences, Keith Alexander
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Maan Alkaisi and Phil
Bones, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
Dave Kelly, School of Biological Sciences, David Norton
School of Forestry, and Rob Hughes, School of Psychology,
Speech and Hearing.
Emeritus Professor is an honorary
title awarded by the UC Council to retiring, long-serving
professors who have made an outstanding contribution to
their field.
The University’s new Emeritus
Professors were celebrated at the Pō Whakamānawa |
Celebrating Excellence event held on campus this week to
acknowledge the accomplishments of UC academics.
The
seven new Emeritus Professors are:
Emeritus
Professor Keith Alexander, who retired from UC’s
Mechanical Engineering Department in October, has a national
and international reputation for product innovation and
development, including designing the well-known Springfree
trampoline, which prioritises safety. Springfree trampolines
have sold over 500,000 models around the world.
During
his career he was a design engineer for Hamilton Jet, the
Kiwi waterjet company, and worked on the Aquada, a
high-speed car that turns into a high-speed jet boat on the
water.
More recently he initiated the development of
the Kera patient transfer system, a new way to safely
transfer people with mobility issues.
Emeritus
Professor Maan Alkaisi was a founding member and a
principal investigator of the MacDiarmid Institute for
Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology from 2002 to
2021.
As a Professor in UC’s Department of
Electrical and Computer Engineering, he led the
nanotechnology research group and played a significant role
in establishing the Nanofabrication
Laboratory.
Emeritus Professor Alkaisi’s interests
cover nanotechnology science and engineering, solar cells
development and fabrication and the interface between
physics and biology.
Emeritus Professor Phil
Bones worked for 11 years as biomedical engineer in
the Department of Cardiology, Canterbury Hospital Board,
Christchurch, and two years as postdoctoral fellow with
cardiac groups in Europe.
He began working in UC’s
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 1988
and retired from teaching in 2021.
His research
interests include biomedical engineering, neuromorphic
computing, image processing and medical
imaging.
Emeritus Professor Alison
Downard is an internationally leading
electrochemist who was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of
New Zealand Te Apārangi in 2014. In the same year she won a
prestigious distinction for international scientists, an
Honorary Doctorate from Université de Rennes 1,
France.
She was a Principal Investigator with the
MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and
Nanotechnology (2002-2021) and is a recipient of the Royal
Australian Chemical Institute’s RH Stokes medal (2014)
which recognises distinguished research in electrochemistry,
carried out mainly in Australasia.
Emeritus
Professor Rob Hughes spent 57 years teaching at UC.
He has research interests in behavioural pharmacology and
comparative psychology and has investigated the effects of
behaviourally active psychiatric and recreational drugs,
especially caffeine.
In recognition of his
contribution, he has been awarded Fellowships of the NZ
Psychological Society, the Association for Psychological
Research and the Psychological Society of Ireland.
His
many roles, nationally and internationally, include being a
member of the New Zealand Ministry of Transport’s Working
Party on Detection of Drug Impairment in Drivers, (1987-89)
and a Mental Health Consultant for the United Nations World
Health Organization to assess the use and availability of
psychotropic medication in Vietnam
(1995).
Emeritus Professor Dave Kelly
joined Plant and Microbial Sciences (later Biological
Sciences) at UC as a lecturer in 1985 and retired at the end
of 2021, although he continues to carry out
research.
He is known internationally for his study of
mast seeding which is a significant conservation issue in
Aotearoa New Zealand. His other major research area has been
the impacts on pollination and fruit dispersal in the
decline in Aotearoa New Zealand’s bird fauna following the
introduction of predatory exotic mammals (particularly
stoats and rats).
He has collected many awards over
his career, including the Te Tohu Taiao award from NZ
Ecological Society (2000), Fellowship of the Royal Society
of New Zealand Te Aparangi (2002), UC Teaching Award (2011),
UC Research Medal (2013) and Hutton Medal
(2013).
Emeritus Professor David
Norton, who retired from UC at the start of this
year, has over 40 years’ experience in Aotearoa New
Zealand ecology and conservation biology issues.
His
research spans Aotearoa New Zealand’s native forests,
conservation and management of threatened plants, and
restoration ecology.
Over the last two decades, he has
developed a strong relationship with the farming sector,
working with farmers, the farming community and sector
groups to promote biodiversity conservation and find ways to
build this into farm management planning, and he has
continued this work in his
retirement.
