Aaron T. Marshall

Aaron Marshall is a New Zealand electrochemist researching improvements to industrial electrochemistry, and a professor of Chemical and Process Engineering at the University of Canterbury.

Academic career After graduating with a Bachelor of Technology (Hons) at Massey University in 2001, Marshall completed a 2002 Masters thesis titled Investigation of cryolite ratio measurement by potentiometric methods at Massey. He then undertook a PhD at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, finishing in 2005. Marshall joined the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Canterbury in 2009, was appointed full professor in December 2021, and in 2024 was Associate Head of the Department of Chemical and Process Engineering. He is a Principal Investigator at the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology, and an Associate Investigator in the University of Canterbury's Biomolecular Interaction Centre.

Research Marshall's electrochemical research concerns managing chemical reactions on the surface of electrodes in energy and hydrogen technologies, looking at ways to minimise the operating costs and emissions of electrochemistry at an industrial scale.

Zethos, founded in 2019 by Marshall and his Master's student Jonathan Ring under the name Zincovery, produces high-quality pure zinc recycled from steel industry waste. While visiting a galvanised steel factory in 2018, Marshall was told a huge amount of zinc in scrap steel was being sent to landfill. During the recycling of scrap galvanised steel, the steel is melted in a furnace but the zinc and other materials are vaporised into furnace dust; an average steel mill will produce tens of thousands of tonnes of furnace dust a year. In April 2026 Zethos opened a $6 million, 2500 m² pilot processing plant in Bromley, Christchurch with 17 staff and a capacity of 1000 tonnes of metal a year. Marshall has stated "In 20 years, I hope zinc is no longer mined at all – it will be recovered and reused." Ternary Kinetics, started in 2023, has developed a renewable energy system that stores hydrogen for electricity generation in a liquid carrier. The liquid can be transported and stored using existing diesel fuel infrastructure, and its hydrogen can be discharged and recharged after use.