2022 MESA report

21 April, 2023

From the MESA Co-Chairs Azy Hashemi and Shikeale Harris

The year 2022 has been a great year for the MacDiarmid Institute Emerging Scientists Association (MESA). We are very happy that we have been able to hold our usual full variety of scheduled events such as workshops, welcome events and site visits, after the past two years facing event cancellations and many limitations due to Covid 19. As always, we kicked off the year by holding welcome events in each of our centres. These always have a great turn out and are a fantastic and fun way to start networking with other MacDiarmid Institute students from each centre.

MESA had two of the famous Python workshops, held in both the North and South Islands for the second year in a row, hosted by Massey and Canterbury Universities respectively, with special thanks to Ben Westberry for running the workshops. The Python workshops have been incredibly popular and sought after in the past few years and have an excellent turnout. Other MESA-organised events this year included an industry site visit to Mint Innovation in July, a 3D/CAD workshop at the University of Auckland in September, a video editing workshop at Victoria University of Wellington in October, and a video tutorial competition. We also held our extremely popular MESA bootcamp, which took place in the days following the MacDiarmid Symposium, in Wellington this December.

During the symposium, a very fruitful and engaging Q&A session was held between the MESA committee and the MacDiarmid Institute students, research assistants and postdoctoral fellows, with hugely engaged and really amazing discussions around inclusivity, diversity and student participation. As a result of this session, the committee is proposing changes to MESA’s constitution and the way MESA is run, going forward into 2023.

Read next

 Wellbeing within the Institute