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Shining a light: Richard Blaikie's brilliant career
Throughout his career, Prof Richard Blaikie has championed the light of science. As he retires, he tells Paul Gorman why that has remained important.
The bookshelves in his Clocktower office are emptying and the boxes are filling, but retiring deputy vice-chancellor Prof Richard Blaikie doesn't appear wistful about leaving it all behind.
He's already thinking of his next big thing.
Blaikie, 59, retired late last month after 14 years as head of the University of Otago's research and enterprise endeavours, making him the university's longest serving deputy vice-chancellor.
Physics, particularly his specialist field of nanotechnology, is calling, and it's only a short distance in a straight line across the Water of Leith to his fourth-floor lab in the Science 3 Building.
His BSc (Hons), first class, was in physics at Otago, and all the years Blaikie has been a member of mahogany row he's remained an active researcher in the department.
"It turns out that the process of packing things up and handing things over has freed up sufficient mind space that I've got a fantastic new idea that I'm working on myself," Blaikie says excitedly. "But I can't tell you anything about it yet.
"It's great because it's in my area of nano-optics, taking some of these things in lithography that I've been thinking about for my whole career. I've identified what I thought was a blind alley, but there might just be a little door at the end of the blind alley, and I want to open it and see if it's still dark behind that.
"Possibly it's work that nobody else has done, so it'll either work or it won't."
When he's not been at work or with wife, Nicola, and family Daniel, Peter and Sophia, you might find him out with his cycling mates, the Phantom Riders, zooming about the Otago Peninsula early on Saturday mornings.
Gore born, Blaikie moved to Dunedin with his family when he was 2 and was "brought up on the hills".
"We weren't allowed bikes, because the street we were in, Crosby St, was very steep with a very busy road at the bottom.
"That was a good precautionary measure. I had a car before I had a bike, a Ford Anglia.
"When I was a student here, in my second year I was still working in the Mornington Countdown on Thursday nights and Saturdays, and to save petrol costs I inherited my brother's old bike, so I would sometimes bike up the hill, up Serpentine Ave to Mailer St."
Blaikie's links to the grocery world even appeared on the front page of the Otago Daily Times on May 19, 1988 with the headline "Goodbye, supermarket" when he won the Royal Society of London's three-year Rutherford Memorial Scholarship.
He proudly showed off this clipping during his inaugural professorial lecture, "Chasing atoms, electrons and optics there and back again", at the university on August 17, 2017.
His time as a Rutherford Scholar placed him well down the paths of nanotechnology and of being one of New Zealand's pre-eminent science leaders and champions.
But where to go for his scholarship and his PhD?
"You think of British universities and two names come to mind immediately. And it turned out the physics department here had a very strong and ongoing active collaboration with Oxford.
"So, I went to Cambridge."
Behind almost every great career story lies a great teacher or two.
Blaikie's interest in physics was ignited at Kaikorai Valley High School by Arch Burn. He also reminisces about chemistry teacher Elizabeth Lalas and maths teacher Russell Smith.
In the early 1980s, Burn "opened a window into a future world" for seventh-former Blaikie.
"We were doing things with old-school resistors and capacitors, and I remember one comment he made that 'there are now electronic circuits that you'll be able to measure voltage without drawing any current', when traditionally voltage and current go one to one with each other. In traditional experiments you've got to be careful what you measure because when you measure something you impact what you're measuring.
"He was giving us this sort of window into a world where electronics was developing at that stage and was well beyond old-school and current teachings. He didn't teach us anything about it, but it was just, 'there is stuff in the world that is very exciting'. And just about that time, schools were getting a computer, and you could write a programme in Basic."
Despite that, Blaikie still wanted to be an airline pilot.
"It's a pretty glamorous sounding career. I was a member of the Otago Aero Club and I took flying lessons while I was at school, and got to the point of going solo. So, I've successfully taken off and landed a plane on my own.
"But I didn't keep that up. I missed out on entry into the air force. But I fly so much I've satisfied the urge."
He started a civil engineering degree at the University of Canterbury, with direct entry to second year, and wanted to make his mark on the world through bridges and buildings.
"I lasted two weeks at that and came back to Dunedin, for three reasons. It was going to be too hard to make that transition from school to second-year university. There was a girlfriend involved, and she was back here. But also the first lecture was the opposite of inspirational. It was literally a lecture on dirt. It was pretty dull.
"It's not that revolutionary — there's not that excitement of things that are more discovery-based. Civil engineering and mechanical engineering are incredibly important, but they're very conservative subjects."
Instead, he took his physics degree at Otago, finding the spark of excitement that was electronics.
"The physics lecturers here were so fantastic that I could see my pathway through my degree. In my final years of that I had knowledge of the fact that a whole lot of great science around the world was done in big electronics companies, like Bell Labs and IBM. And then I saw that the IBM New Zealand recruitment people were coming to campus.
"They gave a great presentation about IBM New Zealand, which was largely a sales and marketing organisation. I remember asking the question, 'so how would you go about getting a job for IBM Research at somewhere like Yorktown Heights?'. The answer was: 'IBM does research?'."
As Dunedin started waking up to the possibilities of a high-tech sector, Blaikie was off to Cambridge. There he discovered the group he had joined had just lost most of its funding.
"Every second light bulb was taken out. Machines had to be shut down overnight to reduce the power bill. As I was getting there, Haroon Ahmed, my supervisor, was planning his world trip to find someone to support our research. And he found Hitachi was keen to invest and create a collaborative research laboratory. By the time that was established, my project was well-enough advanced to be one of the inaugural projects for the Hitachi Cambridge Laboratory."
In 1994, Blaikie took up a postdoctoral fellowship in the department of electrical and computer engineering at Canterbury University, and rose through the ranks to become a professor 13 years later.
He enjoyed family life in Christchurch, and the ease of biking around a cycle-friendly city, and says he learnt a great deal from Prof Peter Gough, "an amazingly good head of department".
But earth-shattering events soon sent the Blaikie family south.
"I'm an earthquake refugee," Blaikie says, making his whānau one of the thousands that left Christchurch for stable ground after the 2010-2011 quakes.
Appointed in 2011 by then vice-chancellor Prof Harlene Hayne as DVC research and enterprise and as a professor in the department of physics, he says he wasn't looking to move away from frontline, hands-on, academia into university administration.
"It was suggested that I might like to apply. And I said, 'well, it's not the kind of job I'm looking for'. But the follow-up was, as is usual for Otago, we still like to have our senior academic leaders as active academics, so there was an expectation I would keep either teaching in an area or researching in an area.
"Technically, at times, I was contracted for up to 10% or 15% of my time, 20% of my time sometimes. So, Friday was research day, but ... it never quite worked out. I was rarely in the department, but I was engaging through students and thinking about research after hours."
He found his first year as a deputy vice-chancellor "pretty hard" in terms of understanding what his role really involved.
"The fact that you've got oversight of the whole of a big, broad, beautiful and high-performing university means also that whenever there's a problem or an issue, often it comes to your door for a resolution or a decision.
"And so, man, making decisions ... you know, as a scientist, you want to be able to deliberate, you want to take some time, shift everything aside and concentrate on what's the issue in front of me. Then maybe put it aside and think about it, and have a cup of coffee or sleep on it.
"But some of the decisions that come to your door don't allow you that time, and also you're working on two or three other critical tasks, and so they draw you away from that. So, yeah, there's a juggle."
Blaikie talks fondly of the late Sir Paul Callaghan and the time he was Callaghan's deputy director at the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology, of which he remains an emeritus investigator.
"[He was] just fantastic, because you could see how he operated, and it was energetic and go forward in ideas, and 'why don't we try this' and 'why don't we do this?' He didn't stand fools, and he didn't really buy into the strategic planning approach or anything. At one stage it was clear that, when you have a centre, you've got to have some structural elements like a vision. So, he called it 'the vision thing'.
"But it was awesome. It was just simply about people, about training people to be excellent and entrepreneurial in spirit and community-minded, training the next generation of researchers to help build a more technology rich Aotearoa."
Are we missing that leadership?
"Hell, yeah. And you can quote me on that.
"It's about inspiring and motivating people to get out there and do this stuff. Of the people I've worked closely with, I hold him in extremely high regard. There's different people with different characteristics. But he was almost the complete leader, technically very capable, driven, but really knew the political side of things exceptionally well."
The irony here is that Blaikie himself has earned for himself a title as one of New Zealand's top science leaders. Although he is far too modest to even hint at that, colleagues are less diffident.
Vice-chancellor Grant Robertson says as well as being an "absolute gentleman" and an exemplar of "kindness and empathy", Blaikie's formidable reputation in science and research is widely recognised.
"When I'm at Universities New Zealand and the topic of research comes up, there'll often be a 'Richard Blaikie said X and Y', and every VC says 'that must be right'.
"That shows his deep knowledge of the sector and how he is extremely well thought of."
While the two didn't work together for long at the university, Robertson had known Blaikie for years, including when he was finance minister in the Labour government.
"At the 150th [anniversary of the university] in 2019, I was giving a talk. Richard was there and walked me out, and in his gentlemanly way gave me some very direct feedback, in an extremely respectful way."
Physics department and Te Whai Ao Dodd-Walls Centre colleague Prof David Hutchinson says Blaikie "has provided an important voice for science, and research more broadly, in the South for well over a decade".
"Richard was not a parochial, combative DVC-R. He genuinely believed in what was best for NZ Inc, rather than just Otago. Perhaps we could appreciate more gentleness such as Richard's in our science leaders — especially given, as everyone acknowledges, that the woeful underinvestment in science, innovation and technology for decades in New Zealand is what drives the excessive competition and fighting for every crumb."
Without Blaikie, there would not have been a MacDiarmid Institute, Hutchinson says.
"Its establishment was a joint affair through Paul, later Sir Paul, Callaghan at Victoria [University of Wellington] and Richard at Canterbury. It has gone on to be an important mainstay of New Zealand's physical science capability, together with Te Whai Ao Dodd-Walls Centre, in which Richard was also a principal investigator and member of its governance board."
Blaikie says he had the "best job in the university".
"It's spanning the whole research portfolio across the university and you get the huge privilege of being able to be a figurehead or someone able to speak on behalf of the institution that employs or is linked with students and researchers that do fantastic things."
While he acted as vice-chancellor on various occasions, had he fancied being Otago's vice-chancellor?
"It wouldn't have been a bad thing," he replies, adding he didn't apply most recently when Robertson got the job.
"I never was driven to become a vice-chancellor. But part of the motivation for taking on this DVC role is just understanding — like everything, like going to postgraduate from undergraduate — what am I capable of doing? What would that job be like? What's that adventure like?
"And doing it in the knowledge that if I end up being beyond my capabilities in that role, I would want to have the wisdom or have someone give me the advice that, yeah, you know ... Again, that's the nice thing about having the continuing academic position that went alongside this role.
"But then one term turned into a second term and, because of the way the world was in 2020-21, that became a third term, probably longer than I would have envisaged.
"Along the way, as vice-chancellor positions came up, I applied for one or two. There were also a number of approaches about vice-chancellorships or other jobs that I didn't pursue. I wasn't just motivated by status."
He signalled his intention to retire earlier this year and "didn't want to make a fuss or a hoo-ha". Despite that, he was awarded an honorary doctor of science degree by the university last month.
"People have been really kind. There's been some local things in the Clocktower, and we had a research division forum. And my EA Karen Bosworth was particularly kind, organising a quiz.
"It's time to go, because it's just hard work and you get tired, and it needs someone with refreshed energy."
Some of that energy can now be poured into the cycling he loves, a pursuit he honed while in the flatlands of Cambridge and Christchurch. He has taken part in a number of endurance events, including charity rides.
"The Phantom Riders are amazing. They're great guys, very family oriented. We get out early so they can be back for kids' sport.
"Pretty much every year there's a tour that the group organises, usually road cycling, sometimes mountain biking. We did Alps to Ocean recently. But I haven't been able to go on all of those tours.
"But one was during the pandemic, when we raised money for student hardship funds at Otago, and we cycled from Dunedin to Nelson via the West Coast. And then last year in March we did Cape Reinga to Bluff, fundraising for the Otago-Southland Rescue Helicopter Trust.
"In 2020 I cycled into Milford Sound and out again, through the Homer Tunnel, and I fell off on the way back up. I couldn't quite get all the way through the tunnel on the green light. So then, as I was about two-thirds of the way through, a car started coming down.
"I thought, OK that's easy, I'll just pull over and let it pass. But when I pulled over, there was so much deep grit built up from when they grit the road, that I lost my balance and then fell back into the middle of the road. The car didn't come anywhere near me.
"I won the prize for Dick of the Day," he adds quietly.
The ride to campus from Andersons Bay in future will hopefully continue to be a lot less eventful. As an emeritus professor, Blaikie says he will still be seen around the university fairly frequently.
"Yeah, I might hang out in the department, or be in the library on my laptop.
"The coffee's good at the university."
