Three New Royal Society Fellows

The Royal Society Te Apārangi announces three researchers from Te Whai Ao — Dodd-Walls Centre elected to its Academy of Fellows. They join several others from the Centre already named as Fellows, or Ngā Ahurei a Te Apārangi, those considered leaders in their field.

This year, fellowships have been awarded to Professor Rod Badcock, Chief Engineer at Paihau — Robinson Research Institute, Victoria University of Wellington; and Professors Stéphane Coen and Geoffrey Waterhouse, at The University of Auckland. The Academy’s key mission is to honour, recognise and encourage outstanding achievement in the sciences, technologies and humanities.

Professor Rod Badcock has an international reputation in high temperature superconducting applications, notably to motors and generators for aerospace. His contribution to new knowledge spans engineering, physics, and materials science, from fundamental to applied research. Rod’s work on optical fibre sensing for fusion generation lays the foundation for future sustainable electricity generation. He has close relationships with industry partners and is the author of 18 patents, all of which have been licensed. He and his colleagues were awarded the Royal Society’s Cooper Medal (2008) for turning fragile high temperature superconducting wire into cable. He won the Society’s Pickering Medal (2022) for his work on superconducting engineering for all-electric aircraft. Rod has recently joined OpenStar Technologies as Director of their Iteration Programme.

Professor Stéphane Coen is a laser physicist who has made outstanding contributions in nonlinear optics. He studied in detail white laser light — or supercontinuum — generation in photonic crystal fibres and identified how to make these unique light sources stable. He co-authored the key review paper in the field which was ranked among the top 20 most cited papers in physics for several years. Stéphane was also the first to observe temporal cavity solitons and recognise their role in the generation of optical frequency combs in microresonators. He has shown how to model these so-called “microcombs” with unmatched computational efficiency and his model has underpinned all microcomb modelling since. His discoveries pave the way for widespread application of these technologies to integrated ultra-accurate sensing and novel optical clocks. Stéphane was awarded the Research Medal of The New Zealand Association of Scientists (2015), the Royal Society’s Hector Medal (2016) and a James Cook Research Fellowship (2017). He is also an Optica Fellow.  

Professor Geoffrey Waterhouse is an internationally renowned materials scientist. He has made ground-breaking contributions to the design of catalysts for the energy sector, discovering low-cost nanocatalysts for sustainable energy storage/conversion devices such as water electrolysers, hydrogen fuel cells and rechargeable metal-air batteries. His pioneering use of synchrotron-based X-ray absorption techniques, together with new computational approaches have greatly improved the mechanistic understanding of catalysts at the nanoscale. Geoffrey's work is highly interdisciplinary, extending to the use of nanotechnology in environmental monitoring and therapeutics. He is the author of >500 journal articles and several patents. His recent accolades include a James Cook Research Fellowship (2021), the Shorland Medal from the New Zealand Association of Scientists (2022) and the Royal Society’s MacDiarmid Medal (2023).  

In congratulating the three new Fellows, Te Whai Ao — Dodd-Walls Centre Director, Professor Frédérique Vanholsbeeck noted how fortunate the Centre was to have them as members.

“It’s great to see the Centre has optics, engineering and materials all being represented in those elected to the Academy this year. Our members appreciate the way we accommodate those from diverse backgrounds to achieve excellence, both individually and collaboratively. We know this adds to the strength of Te Whai Ao’s research offering. It really is a collective effort of complimentary disciplines.”  

Rod, Stéphane and Geoff join a distinguished group of other Centre members elected as Fellows for their outstanding research contributions. These include: Professor Hinke Osinga; Professor Jörg Frauendiener; Dr Crispin Gardiner and Professor Keith Gordon; Centre emeritus members Professor Rob Ballagh; Professor John Harvey; and Professor Howard Carmichael; as well as Centre board members Professor Frank Bloomfield, Professor Richard Blaikie and Professor Cather Simpson, who also serves on the Royal Society’s Academy Executive.

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