Pair give $1.5m for research into sudden climate change

By SIMON COLLINS science reporter

Thirty-five years after graduating from Auckland University, an American scientist has teamed with an Auckland manufacturer to endow a professorship at his old university.

Dr Hilton Glavish of US-based Zimec and Bill Buckley of Buckley Systems in Mt Wellington have jointly donated $1.5 million to fund a physics professor to lead research into sudden climate change.

Auckland University will provide a matching sum so that the professor and research project can be funded out of interest on the total $3 million.

The donation will put the university at the forefront of research on abrupt climate change, a new issue which is sparking widespread concern after recent findings that the Earth has warmed or cooled by as much as 3C to 4C in less than a decade at least five times in the past 65,000 years.

Dr Glavish was born in Australia but grew up in New Zealand and earned his doctorate in physics from Auckland University in 1968.

He later taught at California's Stanford University, left in 1979 to found his own company and has designed a series of key devices used to make silicon chips for computers. He is now a US citizen.

Mr Buckley, who started out as a shipbuilding apprentice, now runs a company that makes about 90 per cent of the world's electromagnets used to purify beams of charged atoms for making silicon chips.

The two men have been friends and business collaborators since Mr Buckley's small engineering workshop built machinery for Dr Glavish's doctoral work in the 1960s.

Today Buckley Systems employs 150 people and earns more than $50 million a year.

Dr Glavish said sudden climate change was an issue that he had been concerned about since first reading about it several years ago.

"I personally didn't believe that man, by himself with what he was doing of late, was responsible for some of the changes," he said.

The head of Auckland University's physics department, Associate Professor Chris Tindle, said the university was already researching related fields such as atmospheric physics, underwater sound and the geophysics of thermal areas and dating rocks.

The position will be advertised internationally early this year.