PhD student number 22 succesfully defends

Today, Mark Hunter had his oral exam, with an exposition on his thesis followed by detailed question and answers with his examiners, Professor Gordon Mallinson from the University of Auckland and Dr Ben Ruck, from Victoria University of Wellington. His overseas external examiner was Professor Joe Seymour, Montana State University.

Mark's thesis and defence were superb and singularly impressed his examiners. The picture shows Mark, Jillian, Samuel and Thomas, at the celebration after the examination.

Mark's PhD work concerned the development of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance techniques to measure the non-local dispersion tensor, a quantity which correlates fluid velocity at different points in space and time in a complex flow field. The measurements are extremely demanding and provide fascinating new insights. Mark's experimental work was verified by computer simulations, or as we prefer to think, the computer simulations were verified by Mark's experiments. These simulations involved a big contribution from Dr Andrew Jackson.

A PhD oral allows a real probing of the candidate's knowledge, not only of the thesis work, but also his or her general command of the science discipline in which they work. As PhD supervisor, my job during the exam is to remain silent unless asked for comment. This did give me time to snap Mark in a seriously pensive moment as shown.

The week leading up to the oral has been a struggle for all of us in the NMR group for the simple reason that Galleria Barrista cafe, our favourite source of great coffee on campus, has closed. The final picture shows members of our group on the last day of Galleria's trading, along with the owners, Tania and Perry, both of whom have been wonderful hosts, and friends we will sorely miss.