Dr. Roger Huntly Newman (1st March 1949–26th July 2014)

Abstract

Roger’s nature, and he himself freely admitted to being a pedant, meant that he was destined to excel in his chosen fields of interest. In 1966 Roger had an idea that he would like to pursue a career in Science. In New Zealand in the 1960s this meant either becoming staff at a University or joining the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research (DSIR). Roger cold-called Ian Walker the director of the DSIR and enquired what he would need to do to be a scientist? The answer saw Roger enrolled at the University of Canterbury (NZ) where he obtained a BSc (Hons) in quantum chemistry and in the process learned to use the powerful multi-kilobyte computers of the time. This instilled in Roger a love of computational chemistry and mathematical modelling of data that became such a large part of Roger’s final research years. From 1970 until 1973 Roger was employed as a scientist in the physical chemistry division of the DSIR. His section was responsible for X-ray diffraction and spectroscopic techniques such as nuclear magnetic resonance. Roger was involved in some of the initial work on spin–lattice relaxation of liquid crystal systems and the effect of gradients on NMR experiments (McLachlan et al. 1971, 1973) that thus became a mainstay technique over Roger’s long research career. In 1973 Roger was awarded an NRAC Fellowship to carry out a PhD at the University of East Anglia (UK) in the area of theoretical and practical carbon, phosphorus and silicon NMR under Robin Harris (Harris and Newman 1977; Harris et al. 1984). He returned to DSIR to become the Spectroscopy Section Leader in 1984 and later, in 1986, took up a 2 year position at Oxford University (UK) as a visiting scientist investigating maximum entropy applications to NMR signal processing (Newman 1988). Roger returned to work as a Research Scientist from 1987 at the DSIR (which became Industrial Research Limited in 1992) until 2004 when he accepted a position at Scion as a Principal Scientist in the area of bio-based materials (Newman et al. 2007). After a brief foray in 1974 into lanthanide induced proton chemical shift modelling (Newman and Neal 1974), Roger’s focus was directed toward the use of NMR to problems in natural materials and environmental science. Roger applied NMR to soil, coal and mineral research, utilising multinuclear and NMR relaxation experiments (Newman and Tate 1980; Newman and Davenport 1987; Parker et al. 1995). In 1979 Roger published the first paper in what was to become his primary area of expertise, NMR, to study the chemistry of plant biology and structure. Roger’s initial focus was on structural determination S. J. Hill (&) Biopolymers and Chemicals, 49 Sala Street, Private Bag 3020, Rotorua 3010, Bay of Plenty, New Zealand e-mail: stefan.hill@scionresearch.com