Waikato News

Branch members enjoyed the presidential visit from Joanne Harvey and her talk, “Chemistry matters - the New Zealand Institute of Chemistry”.

ChemQuest 2024

Nearly 190 students from 19 schools in the greater Waikato and Bay of Plenty region participated in the annual ChemQuest competition, held at the university. This popular event featured music, demonstrations and a “glow show” and combines pop culture with chemistry. Students compete for the ChemQuest trophy and cash prizes. It is a fun-filled evening for students studying NCEA level 2 Chemistry and is always a hard-fought contest.  

Prizes were awarded as follows: 

• 1st Place: Hillcrest High School: (Daisy Evans, Nikita Slesarenko, Elliot Vickery) 
• 2nd Place: St Peter’s School: (Nikhil Jogia, Amirdha Kanchi, Angus MacGillivray)
• 3rd Place: St Peter’s School: (Lucas Beck, Ryoma MacDonald, Dennis Wei)
• 4th Place: Mount Maunganui College: (Amaya Greene, Tye Guy, Mia Olsen)
• 5th Place: Papamoa College: (Jade McGregor, Keira Smith, Ruby Smith)

‍The quiz was generously sponsored by the Waikato Branch of NZIC, Hill Laboratories and the School of Science, University of Waikato. Numerous chemistry staff and students contributed to make the event a very successful one.  

University of Waikato

Tasha Terelmes and Avishekh (Avi) Shankar are carrying out research projects with Megan Grainger over summer. Tasha will be studying the movement of metals in bees whilst Avi will examine physical and chemical differences in raw and creamed honey. The School of Science hosted a Postgraduate Conference in October. Amber Bell won the NZIC (Waikato Branch) award for the best chemistry-related oral presentation and the Scitek award for best presentation on lab-based research while Harmanpreet Kaur won the Sciteck award for the best poster on lab-based research. Both students are supervised by Megan Grainger and are researching heavy metals in bees and the changes in the diastase enzyme caused by compounds unique to manuka honey respectively.