John Watkinson, New Zealand soil chemist, Died at 84

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John Herbert Watkinson died on February 14, 2017.

He was a New Zealand soil chemist.

He studied at Victoria University College, graduating with a BSc in 1953.

Later, John Watkinson completed a PhD at the same institution in 1969, following its attainment of autonomy as Victoria University of Wellington.

Watkinson’ s thesis, supervised by Alex Wilson, was titled The kinetics of ion exchange in soil.

He worked at the Ruakura Agricultural Research Centre and John was noted for developing the fluorometric determination of selenium in biological samples and his research into selenium fertilisers and the determination of the optimum particle sizes for elemental sulphur and reactive phosphate rock.

Watkinson was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 1994 and was also a Fellow of the New Zealand Institute for Advanced Studies.

John Herbert Watkinson passed away at 84 years old.