Young Scientists of the Year - Key Details

The Foundation for Research, Science and Technology is proud to announce, in association with Fisher & Paykel Appliances, the establishment of a new annual awards programme to honour New Zealand's best up-and-coming researchers and scientists.

The new Awards are named after one of New Zealand's greatest scientists -Professor Alan MacDiarmid, who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2000 for the discovery and development of conductive polymers. Professor MacDiarmid was born in the Wairarapa and educated in the Hutt Valley and at Victoria University. He is currently the Blanchard Professor of Chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, USA and the James Von Ehr Professor of Chemistry and Physics at the University of Texas at Dallas, USA.

Key Details

The 2004 Awards are open to all fellows and scholars who are current recipients of a scholarship administered by the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology.

Fellows and scholars are invited to enter a poster in one of eight new categories:

-Agriculture Forestry and Fishing

-Manufacturing and Materials

-ICT and Creative Industries

-Biotechnology

-Infrastructure

-Environmental Sciences

-Maori Innovation

-People and Society

The winner in each of these categories will receive a cash prize of $2,000 and the runner-up $1,000. From these eight categories there will an overall winner of the event who will be flown to Washington DC to join the winners of a similar competition organised by the prestigious American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

The overall runner-up will receive a travel grant to attend a science communication event in Australasia.

The new MacDiarmid Young Scientists of the Year Awards will be presented at a special gala dinner which will be held this year in Auckland on 22 June, which will be attended by Ministers of the Crown, business people, leading scientists and researchers, and science communicators - some of the most influential people from the New Zealand RS&T sector.

Finally, these new look Awards are due in no small part to the generosity of the Award's sponsors, including Fisher and Paykel Appliances who are naming rights sponsors and also the MacDiarmid Centre at Victoria University, Auckland University, Pulse Data International, Crop and Food Research, Landcare Research, Te Puni Kokiri, the National Business Review, Waikato University, AAAS, BTI Travel and ION Automotive.

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