Celebrating International Women's Day 2025

11 March, 2025

For International Women's Day IWD2025, we're celebrating our younger researchers and some of their recent achievements. 

Relating to Reconfigurable Systems:

Dr Yiling Sun and Dr Ayelen Betsabe Tayagui (University of Canterbury) presented a paper on "Microfluidic platform for high-resolution imaging of Oomycete spores exposed to osmotic stress" at the 38th International Conference on Micro Electro Mechanical Systems in Taiwan. 

Dr Yiling Sun

Dr Claudia Allan, Research Assistant with Principal Investigators Associate Professor Jenny Malmstrom and Professor Volker Nock officially completed all requirements for her PhD "In the dark, but well informed: How do plant roots sense water stress and pathogens?" at the University of Canterbury.

Dr Claudia Allan

Former MacDiarmid Institute PhD student and now postdoc at Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, Dr Sevgi Önal saw the publication of the final results of her thesis. "On-chip non-contact mechanical cell stimulation - quantification of SKOV-3 alignment to suspended microstructures" reports the observation of the alignment of SKOV-3 cells to hanging microstructures structures, an unexpected behaviour observed in Professor Volker Nock’s group while developing a cell compression platform together with Emeritus Investigator Prof Maan Alkaisi.

Dr Sevgi Önal

Relating to Future Computing:

PhD students Kiri van Koughnet and Elma Joshy (both based at Victoria University of Wellington) travelled with Associate Investigator Dr William Holmes-Hewett to the SPring-8 synchrotron in Japan to do x-ray magnetic circular dichroism measurements on compensated rare-earth nitride thin films of DyNdN. The rare earth nitride regular weekly team meeting was then treated to a presentation of the latest results - live from the synchrotron.