Keynote Speakers

Nina Hood, Academic Director, The University of Auckland

Nina has a background as a secondary school teacher in Auckland. She has an MSc and DPhil in Education from The University of Oxford, and worked as an academic at The University of Auckland for eight years. She is the founder of The Education Hub, a not-for-profit with a mission to bridge the gap between research and practice in education. She also is a co-founder of The Teachers' Institute, which offers school-based teacher training programmes.

Peter Mahaffy, Professor of Chemistry, King's University, Edmonton

The chemistry of cool: Empowering STEM students to contribute to sustainability using systems thinking

Peter Mahaffy is a 3M National Teaching Fellow, Professor of Chemistry at the King's University in Edmonton, Canada, and director of the King's Centre for Visualization in Science (www.kcvs.ca), which provides digital learning resources used by a half-million students, educators, and the public from over 100 countries each year. His current research and professional work is at the interfaces of chemistry education, systems thinking and sustainability, the uses of interactive visualization tools to facilitate the learning of science, and the responsible uses of chemistry.

Nicola Nelson, Dean of Science, Victoria University of Wellington

Tuatara conservation has been founded on understanding the biology of sex determination, disease ecology and restoration of populations. Nicky will present case studies on research into aspects of the biology of tuatara that have supported their removal from the threat list and empowered iwi to manage their taonga, while also demonstrating the risk to reptiles with climate warming and opportunities for local conservation initiatives for lizards.