Team lead for advanced engineering and materials
I lead the Advanced Engineering & Materials team, one of five teams in our Applied Technologies group. I joined Callaghan Innovation in 2014 after completing a master's degree in mechanical engineering at the University of Canterbury.
Since joining I have delivered a wide range of projects for our customers. I contributed to the development of a groundbreaking tool for extracting core samples from live eucalyptus trees. This innovation significantly increased efficiency, enabling a single operator to sample 50-100 trees per day, compared to the previous system's capacity of 10-20 trees. Our innovation opened up new research workstreams around preferred tree characteristics, ultimately aimed at producing straight eucalyptus timber.
One of my contributions to our team’s capability was designing our hydrodynamics test rig, a versatile facility used for analysing the performance of propellers and pumps, as well as studying the flow behaviour of submerged structures.