New Zealand Science Teacher

Young scientists among scholarship winners

23/11/2015

A budding astronaut and a viticulturist are among those one step closer to their career goals after a financial boost from a well-known scholarship programme.

A number of scholarships totalling more than $200,000 were awarded at the AMP Scholarships National Awards evening held in Auckland last week.

The AMP National Scholarship recipients each received $10,000 towards their work or study projects.

These included young Hawkes Bay viticulturist Alice Rule who is working towards introducing sustainable technologies to her industry using a drone to provide real-time imagery to a cloud-based analytics systems.

PhD candidate Melanie Grant will complete medical research on cancer immunotherapy in the USA, allowing her to bring the technology back to New Zealand in order to improve treatment for cancer sufferers.

Scott Sambell is a sanctuary manager who will use his scholarship to update software and other equipment to help in his work controlling invasive predators.

Three Study Start scholarships of $10,000 each were awarded to young scientists.

Eighteen-year-old aspiring astronaut Monique Oliver from Taranaki (pictured above) was one of 48 secondary school students worldwide to attend a space programme at the Johnson Space Centre in Texas. She is now an aerospace engineering student.

Student doctor Liam Melville aims to bridge the gap in health outcomes for Māori.

And robotics engineer Janitha Gunathilake, 18, recently built a six-legged robot that is capable of crawling into clogged air-conditioning tubing to assess the magnitude of damage using a camera.