Our primary role as a Regional Branch of the Royal Society Te Apārangi is the promotion of science in the Rotorua area. We are a registered charity and our charities commission number is CC30515. Our annual report can be found on the Charities Commission web site.

Our main activity is holding a series of regular meetings each year, usuallly at 6 pm on the second Tuesday of each month from March through to November, but is dependant on speaker avaliblity.
Our normal venue is the Rimu Room, which is the main lecture theatre at Scion on the Te Papa Tipu Innovation Park, 49 Sala St, Rotorua. The meetings cover a range of scientific and technological topics, often including social implications. We set out to provide an impartial forum for discussing contentious issues of science and technology. We aim to be of interested to everyone the wider community - not just for scientists!

Membership is open to all those who support the objectives of the Society. Visitors are welcome to our meetings and we are especially pleased to see senior school students. Come along and see and hear for yourselves! If you want to join up and pay a modest subscription you will receive regular notices of meetings and at the same time help keep our programme going. The bigger our membership, the less the restrictions are on our choice of speaker – we can then afford more speakers expenses.

For some of our meetings we join forces with other societies around Rotorua, according to the particular topics.

Apart from our meetings, we have some other activities. Each year, since its inception, we have been involved along with other parties in mounting the Bay of Plenty School Science Fair. We also occasionally get involved in submissions relating to pending legislation, national reviews of fields of research, or draft district plans.

Subscriptions are $20 for an individual or family and can be paid at monthly meetings or by contacting the treasurer – Lloyd Donaldson at Scion.

Laura Raymond - Branch President.