Honouring the Legacy of Professor John Harvey

Professor John Harvey has been made a life member of the Australian and New Zealand Optical Society. The award followed a celebration of his career and his 80th birthday at the Australian and New Zealand Conference on Optics and Photonics in Auckland. It was fitting to have received the award from ANZOS, given it was John himself who convinced the Australian Optical Society (AOS) to incorporate NZ in 2020 for the purpose of advancing optics in both countries.  

John is considered a pioneer of optics and photonics in New Zealand.  He is known for his drive and entrepreneurship in establishing Southern Photonics in 2001, selling instruments and solutions for a wide range of optical test, measurement, lab and industrial needs. He later spun out a separate daughter company, Coherent Solutions, which became known as Quantifi in 2020. Quantifi was sold earlier this year for an undisclosed sum. John has since formed two other companies, Southern Lasers and Southern Sensors. These are perhaps a good guide to where New Zealand’s future strengths in photonics lie.  

Blessed with foresight, persistence and underlying optimism, John saw the value in lasers from the mid 1970’s, publishing a multitude of highly respected papers. He could imagine using lasers in biotech as well as the health sector and began exploring their impact on motile cattle sperm. In another example of his visionary thinking, John established a multi-disciplinary degree at Auckland University (1993-2017) known as the BTech in Optoelectronics. Less than ten years after it was shut down, such courses are being called for in response to the quantum and photonic skills shortage.

John is also known for his ability to bring people along with him – whether at Southern Photonics delivering a highly delicate gadget to the other side of the world, or by convincing his students to study seaweed for a year. He was formative in the lives of many students, especially those early BTech graduates. Today they’re working in prestigious companies and organisations around the world. Their comments demonstrate that he inspired them to think beyond traditional boundaries and many students consider time spent under his tuition pivotal to their careers.

As founders go, John has had the willpower and temerity to get a lot of his ideas off the ground. He also had the connections. John formed enduring relationships with international researchers from the 1960’s at the University of Surrey in Guildford, UK, later at UCLA and in Munich in the mid 1980’s. He worked hard to attract leading researchers to New Zealand to participate in regular workshops on laser physics and quantum optics. Along with Professor Crispin Gardiner, he began the global collaborations Te Whai Ao is known for today.

Working at the University of Auckland, John recognized the importance of training in the latest hot-topics and regularly paid for students & postdocs to attend summer schools in Australia, New Zealand, and even further abroad. The 1990’s opened the door to a new field of study in non-linear optics, fibre lasers and ultrafast fibre. In the 2000s Auckland photonics went from strength to strength.

Professor Harvey became the founding director of the Dan Walls Centre for Pure and Applied Optics at the University of Auckland in 2006. At the same time, the Jack Dodd Centre for Quantum Technology opened at the University of Otago, under the directorship of Professor Crispin Gardiner. For seven years there was a collaboration between the two research centres called the Dodd-Walls Centre for Quantum Science, with two co-directors (the directors of each collaborating institution). This "Dodd-Walls Centre" held the first Dodd-Walls Annual Symposium in Auckland in 2007. In 2006–2007, under the leadership of Gardiner and Harvey, a bid was made for Centre of Research Excellence (CoRE) funding for the Dodd-Walls Centre from New Zealand's Tertiary Education Commission. That was unsuccessful, but Professors David Hutchinson and Neil Broderick reapplied and in 2015 the Centre as we know it was born. From 2013 John retired most responsibilities at the university and transferred full-time to Southern Photonics.

In closing, John’s continuing and past achievements will always be remembered. His colleagues lamented the fact there wasn’t a “retired” person to write up the history of optics and photonics in NZ. At 80, he’s still going strong with lots of projects. One colleague told the packed auditorium of well wishers,

“I hope John knows the untold good that he sparked in his students’ lives.”  

From the archives…three things you probably never knew about John Harvey:

1.) After the Rainbow Warrior bombing in 1985 John established a permanent police forensic lab at the University of Auckland.

2.) Today he produces Black Stilt wines from his vineyard in the Waitaki Valley.

3.) He’s such a frequent flyer that even his travel agent celebrates his birthdays.

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