Professor Bob Buckley is a physicist who has held numerous leadership roles since joining New

Zealand’s physical sciences national laboratory in 1981. He was the founding Director of the

Robinson Research Institute, Victoria University of Wellington, from 2014 to 2016. He has been a

visiting scientist at Simon Fraser University, Imperial College, University of Regensburg and Exxon

Research and Engineering Company.

His work on superconductivity began in 1987, taking a leadership role from 1989. In over 34 years in

this role, Bob built a team of scientists and engineers and led the transition from HTS materials

discovery through HTS wire and cable development, and on to the development of a range of HTS

technologies. He had oversight of, and managed, numerous significant R&D contracts with research

and industrial partners in New Zealand, China, USA, and Europe. The team has enacted a research

programme that led to the development of a range of HTS based technologies including wire, Robel

cable, magnets, transformers, rotating machines and MRI systems.

Bob’s research interests cover a wide range of materials including amorphous semiconductors,

zeolites, ionic conductors, magnetic materials, and sea ice, and since their discovery in 1987, high-Tc

superconductors (HTS). He was a key investigator in the synthesis and discovery of a range of HTS

materials. Bob is a co-inventor of Bi-2223, a foundation compound for the manufacture of HTS

wires.

The HTS developments resulted in two spin-out companies in New Zealand, HTS-110 Ltd. (2004) and

General Cable Superconductors Ltd. (2008) with Bob serving on their boards.

Bob’s PhD in Physics is from Victoria University of Wellington, and he is a Fellow of the Royal Society

of New Zealand. In recognition of the importance of these career contributions for New Zealand,

Bob was awarded in 2004 the inaugural Royal Society of New Zealand Pickering Medal, for

excellence in innovation and technology, and in 2009, co-winner of the inaugural New Zealand Prime

Minister’s Science Prize, for transformative scientific advance.