Gavin Robinson 

    

   Dr Peter Robinson 

 

Gavin completed his BSc (Chemistry) at Waikato University in Hamilton before joining the team at R J Hill Laboratories (as the 15th staff member at the time), where he worked for 14 years running and then overseeing operations in the Trace Element testing areas.  Gav was heavily involved in method and process development as well as LIMS design and lab automation.  Gav was also a Client Service Manager and head of the Health & Safety (clinical) testing division.

Gav has considerable expertise in running and servicing AA, GFAA, ICP & ICP-MS instruments as well as liquid handling automation robots.  He is also well known for his data processing programming and has saved many laboratory staff countless hours through the use of his automation tools.

Having been an invited speaker at a number of international conferences, Gav has also been as far afield as Papua New Guinea servicing laboratory instruments and training staff, and he makes regular trips to Australia for training and applications support purposes.

In his spare time Gav enjoys fishing, weight training and sports.

 

Born and schooled in Gisborne, NZ.  Peter completed a PhD in Chemistry at Auckland University, then spent seven years in medical research in the Department of Paediatrics, Auckland Medical School, including 2 years as Ruth Spencer Medical Research Fellow. His research, mainly on cystic fibrosis, involved fatty acids and prostaglandins, and used many different analytical techniques. He was involved with the introduction of GC autoanalysers into NZ Labs, and even wrote his own integration software on what was, reputedly, the first microcomputer in a laboratory in NZ (a Wang 2000).

Peter spent two years in Cardiff, Wales, as UK Cystic Fibrosis Research Trust Senior Research Fellow. He was involved with a wide range of projects, and again a variety of analytical techniques.

On return to NZ, he spent fifteen years at Wintec, Hamilton, as Senior Lecturer in Analytical and Organic Chemistry, Biochemistry and Pharmacology before moving to Hill Laboratories to set up organic testing for their environmental clients. He spent 25 years at Hill Labs and retired from Hills at the end of May 2017. Peter is involved with the NZ Drinking Water Standards, MfE Contaminated Land Guidelines and the NEMS for water quality, and has given many presentations at seminars and conferences in NZ and overseas.

Peter was a co-founder the of NZ Chromatography Group (1973), which ran courses on GC and HPLC at Wintec.  He has been an Honorary Lecturer at both Waikato University and Wintec, and was awarded an Honorary Fellowship by Wintec in 2017 for his enduring commitment to science, the commercial science community, Wintec and the wider community.