Clive Davies awarded prestigious Chemeca Medal

ICHEME Fellow Clive Davies has received the Chemeca Medal, most prestigious chemical engineering award in Australia and New Zealand. He was presented with the award by the Australian and New Zealand Federation of Chemical Engineers (ANZFChE) at this month’s Chemeca conference in Auckland, New Zealand.

The Chemeca Medal is awarded to a prominent Australian or New Zealand chemical engineer who has made an outstanding contribution, through achievement or service, to the practice of chemical engineering in its widest sense, and who continues to serve the profession.

Davies has contributed to the field at all levels over a five-decade career: as a researcher, an educator, and extensively within the professional bodies of IChemE, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE), Engineering NZ, and the Royal Society Te Apārangi.

An alumnus of Imperial College London, UK, Davies emigrated to New Zealand in 1976. He started out as a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Canterbury, before moving to Industrial Research Ltd, a research services company that is now part of Callaghan Innovation. He returned to academia in 2003 when he became professor of particle and process engineering at Massey University. He was also an associate investigator with the Riddet Institute, New Zealand’s internationally acclaimed centre for fundamental and strategic scientific research in food.

Davies has also co-chaired Chemeca, acted as conference chairman for the Asia Pacific Conference on Sustainable Energy and Environmental Technologies (APCSEET) in 2005, and technical co-chair for the Fluidization XVI conference. He has served on the Board of IChemE in New Zealand, and on many panels for the Royal Society Te Apārangi. In 2020, Davies was honoured by the AIChE’s Particle Technology Forum, which bestowed on him the PSRI Fluidization and Fluid Particle Systems Award. Davies retired in 2022.

As the recipient of the Chemeca Medal, Davies was offered the opportunity to present a plenary at the Chemeca conference, an annual event for chemical and process engineers. In his lecture, entitled Chemical Engineering in Action: Processes, Profits, Particles, Planes, Plants, Davies recounted some of the influences and experiences that shaped his professional life, including joining IChemE as a student member.

Yvonne Baker, CEO of IChemE, attended this year’s conference. She said: “I was delighted to be able to congratulate Clive in person on his very well-deserved award following his decades of dedicated work across particle processing, flow measurement, and solids metering; I thoroughly enjoyed his plenary lecture.”

Chemeca is the annual conference for the Australian and New Zealand community of chemical and process engineers and industrial chemists. It is a key opportunity for collaboration between industry and academia, sharing knowledge, experience, ideas, and insights.