Sir Paul Callaghan (1947–2012)
Professor Sir Paul Callaghan, physicist and founding director of the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology, passed away on 24 March 2012.
Sir Paul Callaghan
Professor Sir Paul Callaghan, physicist and founding director of the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology.
Nuclear magnetic resonance research
Sir Paul grew up in Whanganui, gained a degree in physics at Victoria University of Wellington and went on to earn a DPhil degree at the University of Oxford, where he researched low-temperature physics. On his return to New Zealand in 1974, he lectured at Massey University, where he began research using the nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometer bought by the chemistry department. He investigated the applications of magnetic resonance to the study of soft matter and published Principles of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Microscopy in 1994.
In 2001, he moved to Wellington where he was appointed Alan MacDiarmid Professor of Physical Sciences at Victoria University. He helped establish the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology. Present director Professor Kathryn McGrath says Sir Paul “got his energy from other people, he sparked off other people all the time. There’s nothing more exciting than if you think something is really cool and then someone that you respect starts to also say it is really cool. Once he became involved with something and was invigorated by it, he was a bit of a machine really.’’
Magritek
Sir Paul set up a company to commercialise his NMR technology in 2004. Magritek began with two staff and enough funding for 6 months. The company makes and sells portable NMR measuring devices using a scaled-down version of the science used in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans. By 2012 this had grown to 23 staff, and its clients include international oil companies and pharmaceutical companies. Find out mroe about Magritek's successes here.
Science is grounded in evidence and consistency, but scientific insights are always creative acts. We are always looking for a new direction to explore or a new experimental trick for encouraging nature to reveal herself.
Innovations – Magritek
A Wellington company is helping to unlock secrets held deep within the Earth. Magritek’s nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) technology has been used everywhere from Antarctica to major oil fields and even in a chocolate factory.
While not everyone knows about the physics of NMR, many people will have come across its application in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) devices used in hospitals. These devices provide high-resolution images of the structure of the human body for diagnostic purposes. What Magritek is doing is taking the MRI out of the hospital and taking it into surprising new places.
Magritek created the world’s only MRI teaching device, Terranova-MRI. This is an affordable ‘lab in a box’ that can go to places that bulkier MRI machines cannot. It was first developed for a research trip to Antarctica. After that trip, Magritek realised that a robust, portable MRI device would be useful to look inside items such as rocks, living plants and foods.
Meanwhile, Magritek’s newest tool, the Rock Core Analyzer, is helping the oil and gas industry. Contrary to popular perception, oil fields are not large pools of easily accessible liquid – rather, the oil is stored in the pores of rocks. The Rock Core Analyzer helps the oil industry to understand how liquid moves in and out of those pores, and this ultimately enables more oil to be extracted.
Helmed by 2011 New Zealander of the Year Professor Paul Callaghan and harnessing talent from Massey University and Victoria University of Wellington, Magritek is using this amazing technology to develop more MRI products for customers all over the world.
Find out more
Find out more about how MRI is used to diagnose and detect disease.
Watch these video clips where Dr Richard Watts from University of Canterbury explains how an MRI works and what it’s used for.
So how does MRI work?
What can we use an MRI for?
Find out more about Magritek.
Students
When asked what he was most proud of, Sir Paul replied, “Professionally, what I’m most proud of is the young people who have come out of my lab. I’ve had 24 PhD students, numerous master’s students and all the people I’ve taught at undergraduate. The graduate students have all done incredibly well. Everyone who comes out of my lab gets two or three job offers, all over the world.” One of those PhD students, Andrew Coy, who worked with Sir Paul for 25 years and now runs Magritek, says, ‘‘He was just always so energising and passionate about what he did. When I was doing my PhD, we’d be sitting there doing some experiments getting all excited and suddenly it would be 3am. I would drag myself back into the lab in the morning and Paul had already been in there and started the next experiment and was excited about the results of the next one.”
Science communicator
Sir Paul was also a gifted science communicator. He took part in a series on Radio New Zealand, which resulted in the book As Far as We Know: Conversations about Science, Life and the Universe. He wanted to convince New Zealanders that science could be interesting and comprehensible. In 2009, he published Wool to Weta: Transforming New Zealand’s Culture and Economy, which deals with the potential for science and technology entrepreneurialism to diversify New Zealand’s economy.
Awards
He was the recipient of numerous awards, including:
Fellow of the Royal Society of London – 2001
Rutherford Medal – 2005
Principal Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit – 2006
James Cook Research Fellowship, Royal Society of New Zealand – 2008
Knighthood – 2009
Günther Laukien Prize for Magnetic Resonance – 2010
New Zealander of the Year – 2011.
Activity idea
Sir Paul Callaghan was excited by the possibilities of scientific research and sought to communicate that to other New Zealanders. Your students may like to watch these videos clips, in which other scientists discuss what excites them about their work.
The article Working as a scientist provides a very brief overview of some of the dozens of scientists featured on the Hub.
