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Dr Hamish Campbell
Hamish Campbell is a geologist and research scientist with the Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences in Wellington. He is Te Papa's official geologist and has appeared as a guest presenter on Coast New Zealand.
Dr Richard O'Driscoll, NIWA - Monitoring the Ross Sea Marine Protected Area
In Jan-Feb 2019, an international team of 21 scientists and 19 crew spent 6 weeks on RV Tangaroa in studying the environment and ecosystem of the Ross Sea, Antarctica. This was the second of the two research voyages to the Ross Sea region funded by the New Zealand Ministry of Business, Innovation, and Employment (MBIE) for the 2018 and 2019 summer seasons. The eight voyage objectives covered everything from oceanography to bacteria to whales. The major focus of the 2019 voyage was to provide baseline information about the recently established Ross Sea Marine Protected Area, to allow scientific evaluation of its ecological status, spatial adequacy, and effectiveness. This talk will cover the voyage highlights, describing the challenges of living and working in the Antarctic environment, and the various sampling tools used to measure and monitor the ecosystem.
Dr Cather Simpson
Cather Simpson uses exotic laser pulses to study how matter converts light into more useful forms of energy. When she started the Photon Factory at the University of Auckland, she took her fundamental science know-how in exciting new directions – all the way from molecular motions on the millionths of a billionth of a second time scale to sorting sperm by sex for the dairy industry. She is also an avid teacher and science communicator, with public talks this year at Te Papa in Wellington, The Perimeter Institute in Canada, and to celebrate the International Day of Light in Italy.