 Welcome to the Research Works Wonders Live. This is the first of two headline events of the postgraduate festival going on at Auckland University at the moment. I'm Professor Brian James. I'm Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Engineering and I'm your NC for tonight. And I'm genuinely delighted to be here. The four speakers that I get the pleasure of introducing are frankly inspirational and that's why they're here to speak to you. But I wouldn't be an engineer if I didn't put health and safety first. So before we go any further, I would like to give you our emergency procedures for this lecture theatre. Should an oxygen mask fall from the ceiling, we will all be quite surprised. However, if the fire alarm sangs, please evacuate the lecture theatre calmly. There's a fire exit here at the front of the two doors that you came in through and the assembly areas on Wynyard Street and Grafton Road. Now tonight's speakers represent big thinkers from four of our eight faculties and they're going to talk on a really diverse range of subjects. And what we hope is that tonight's event is going to inspire you all to consider your future direction and hopefully that future direction will include postgraduate study and research which will benefit not only yourself but of course the future of New Zealand as well. At the end of the talks, we'll invite all the speakers back to have a seat and have a question and answer session. So whilst you're listening to their talks, talks are quite quick, they're only 12 minutes each, whilst you're listening to their talks, selt away the questions that you would like to ask. And you're welcome to ask not just about their topic but about their own personal postgraduate and research journey. The event tonight is also being live-streamed and never thought I would be on a live-streamed event. So hello to anybody watching from around the world. Sorry we're not your revision, but we are the next best thing. So onwards straight away. Our first speaker is an entrepreneurial academic producing groundbreaking applied research and teaching in politics and government. She's a world expert in political marketing and won the International Association for Public Participation Research Award for Australia. Her innovative course, The Practice of Politics, which she teaches here at the University of Auckland, explores the nature, suitability, skills and ethics needed to succeed when working in politics, government and international relations. Please welcome from the Faculty of Arts Associate Professor, Jennifer Lees Marshmond. Thank you, thank you all for coming here this evening. And then, like Bronnie said, thank you to everyone who's watching live from wherever you are. So what I'm going to talk about today is Vote Compass, which is an online engagement tool used in the 2014 election and something that we're going to use in 2017. So my area of study is politics and politics is all about power. And I look at political marketing, which studies to the extent to which those in power, politicians, parties and government, respond to public views. Vote Compass showcases those public views on policy in elections via a media partner like TVNZ. Now Vote Compass comes from Canada and the reason I got involved in it was because of a book I edited on political marketing in Canada while still in New Zealand. And the people who run Vote Compass in Canada asked me to work with them on bringing it to New Zealand, which we did in 2014. And this talk will go over how Vote Compass works and how it helps take the voice of the people to those in power in New Zealand in 2014, as well as what it might do this year. So Vote Compass works by, first of all, identifying the party positions on a range of policy issues through academic research done at the university. And then it offers the public the chance to go online and answer 30 questions or more about their views on those policies. Then it connects the two and it gives voters a map like the one you can see and the screen behind me where they find out which party they actually most closely align with. And it's not always who they expect. Sometimes the party they most prefer isn't the one who has the policies they prefer. It also then produces data on what the public think overall to everybody who does Vote Compass survey and what they think as a whole about 30 issues. Now our role as academics is to be an academic advisor and to advise on the New Zealand issues and survey questions. And we also fund and manage the graduate research assistants who assess the party policies which is a key part of the tool. And then most importantly, we analyse the data when it comes in and during the election campaign your steers will be speaking on TVNZ reports about what the data means, what it tells us about voters' views and how effectively the parties are responding to those views. Now in terms of the impact it had in 2014, it had several different important contributions. The most important one was that they put very detailed views of the public on the agenda. Vote Compass isn't usual, it's much better than a standard public opinion poll because it gives such detailed views on a wide range of policy issues. And you don't get that in a standard opinion poll because the standard methodology is just too expensive, it's too costly for political parties, media organisations to do. It also, because of the unique partnership with the media partner, which in New Zealand is TVNZ, means that those views get centre front of stage airing during an election campaign. And that's particularly important during campaigns which we know from research can often focus on personalities, on scandal, if you remember in 2014 there was a dirty politics scandal that took place. And in that kind of situation, Vote Compass is really important and valuable in keeping policy, detailed serious policy on the agenda. In 2014 it was incredibly exciting to be involved as an academic because for once we were engaged in direct, impactful research that was actually having a direct effect. And I remember the first day it was launched and I went on breakfast TV in the morning to talk about the tour and then I did a pre-recorded interview about it which then played on the 6pm news that evening. And then I went home because it was officially launched and I remember watching online as the numbers who were doing it went up. Each time we refreshed the page it jumped up 20,000 or 50,000. And it was just such an amazing experience to know that because of being an academic and working at the University of Auckland we had actually managed to engage New Zealanders directly in talking about politics and policy during an election. We don't often get such instant feedback so it was really great. The other wide impact was that of democratic impact. So first of all it engaged people on policies. We actually got over 330,000 people who did the tour in 2014. And that's actually the most per capita for any Vote Compass up to that point. The equivalent in the UK is over at least over 4 million. So it's actually a really large number. The other thing it did was increase voting enrollment. So the electoral commission who are also another sponsor of the online Vote Compass found that over 13,000 people clicked actually enrolled after clicking on the button on the advert on the Vote Compass page saying click here to enroll. So it drew people into Vote Compass and then it drew people into actually enrolling to vote. And it may also have increased voter turnout because turnout rose in 2014. Now more indirectly but still importantly we think that it encouraged government to think about inequality. So what happened was Vote Compass data comes in sections. So normally we get a report on what people think about housing and we do a media thing on that. And then we'll get something on the economy and education and health and so on. And we do a media report on each kind of theme of policies. What I began to realise though towards the end particularly with my political marketing research expertise was that it was actually an overall trend through all of this data that we needed to, that was important, that we hadn't noticed until we looked at it overall. And I suggested to TVN said look, we need to do a final wrap up story. And they did, they produced this video called what Vote Compass taught us. And they played it on election night in that very quiet period before the election results come in when some brilliant academics like Ray Miller managed to talk about all sorts of things until we've actually got some results. And in this video I noticed that overall the data had showed that the government really needed to address a very strong underlying concern that voters were expressing by ordinary New Zealanders that not everybody was doing as well as they could. And that even national voters, national lean supporters or high owners were concerned about this. They were really concerned about inequality. Two days after winning the election, John Key, the then Prime Minister, even though he'd won a major election and a major victory, he noted that he needed to pay attention to this. So he said there's a legitimate concern from New Zealanders right across the inconspectrum about helping people. And he said, I just think we can do, we need to do work on that issue. And I've said to the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet this morning I want to see more advice on that. And that was echoing some of the things that we had generated in from Vote Compass. So it was really important. A month later they announced proposals to increase welfare and there was actually the biggest, the first real increase in welfare benefits in 44 years. Now, I'm not saying that the link between Vote Compass and Government Action was direct. You know, it's never quite that simple. It impact isn't that easy to prove. But I think by raising New Zealanders' concerns about inequality in 2014, going through that smog of dirty politics and national having a clear victory to say actually there's still an underlying concern here. We at least, at the very least, reinforced what John Key and the Government was already thinking. More importantly because I added in a political marketing expertise which doesn't just say what are the nice policies and what's nice to have but says is it going to be politically beneficial, I made it clear that it would be worth them considering acting on it. Because in fact if they didn't, there was a risk that the public would see them as unresponsive and they would lose touch. And this really illustrates the potential for political marketing, the research that we do at the University and Vote Compass to help convey the public's voice to those in power. You wouldn't have found those underlying trends via any other form. So it was really important. And then the last significant point is the warning signs that Vote Compass identified for the major parties, some of which they listened to and some of perhaps they didn't. So the most of Compass survey and a post-election survey we did identified a number of lessons for them that we now know three years later were very valid. So first of all for Labour, the concern was not so much that the policies were a problem, in fact a number of policies were very favourable but it was that the leader wasn't seen as being in touch enough and they weren't seen as capable of delivering. There's no point having great policies that people love if people don't think that you're going to deliver them. You've got to be able to actually do it in power. And then for National it was that it's not just economy, it's also inequality. You can see them from the graph that the economy was the top issue and National campaigned on that, that was a major strength of theirs. Inequality was a very, very close second. So even then before the housing crisis that we see now in 2016-17, there was concern about inequality. And there was a number of statistics that backed this up. So nearly 70% respondents wanted the government to do more to reduce the gap between rich and poor. 67% thought the government should build a somewhat or much more affordable housing for keywords to buy. And this was back in 2014 before the housing crisis that we knew. And even National supporters had that desire. So nearly half of National supporters wanted the government to do more to reduce the gap between rich and poor. So it was a concern. And here we are three years later, 2017. These are issues at the forefront. National's beginning to lose its image for being touched. Labour is still having to work on being seen as a party of government able to deliver. So in summary, looking forward to the next election. As in 2014, this year in 2017, we expect that it comes to play a similarly important democratic role. It's something that goes beyond the simplicity and superficiality of headline polls of who is ahead. What's Andrew Little doing of being seen to do ahead with Bill English? And there are many hidden issues behind the rock star economy that researchers at the University of Auckland are working with the media to bring to the fore. It's not just housing, but it's transport, gender, diversity, immigration, the regions. There's a lot bubbling beneath the surface. What vote compass will do in this year's election is it will help bring those issues to the fore. It will help raise voters' voices once again. And this is an example of the benefits that research can have, particularly when the university works in partnership in an impactful way with organisations like TV and Z and the Electoral Commission. And as for my own research in political marketing, it's something that can be applied to current events and produce advice for better practice. I have had several graduate students over the years working on issues like how responsive are the parties to voters? How do parties win elections? How to make the Labour Party marketable? How to stop national losing its responsiveness? Why did the Trump brand win over Hillary's brand? And will Andrew Little build English's brand personality triumph this year in New Zealand? And also with vote compass, we have graduates working on that, too, actually getting involved in the exercise. So my final point is this. What you should do in 2017 is do vote compass in August when it comes along. This is an example, not just of research, but actually making a difference in society. And your voice, just as those people's voices who did it in 2014 could actually have a major impact on the government, whoever is elected. Because we don't yet know. OK, thank you. Thank you, Jennifer. I think it's reassuring to think that as we go into the election in 2017, we will see policy front-end centre rather than simply headlines. And it's nice to think that University of Auckland is helping to drive that. Our next speaker leads the Morris Wilkins Centre at the University of Auckland. Now, this is a National Centre of Research Excellence, or a CORE, and it promotes a multidisciplinary approach to discovery of new medicines and vaccines. His lab at the University's School of Biological Sciences focuses on the human immune system, especially understanding how immune cells can be used in cancer therapy. To talk about his research, please welcome from the Faculty of Science Professor Rod Dunbar. Thanks, Barney. The I.T. is not quite playing ball. There we go. Great. We're under way. Well, thanks for coming out, everybody. Great to see so many excited young faces in the audience. The title of my talk is Radical Approach to the Future of Cancer Treatment. I'm going to take you through some of our research work as we go. Because it's hard to see, I'm going to turn the lighting down a little bit. I know this is going to annoy everybody who's set up the video so carefully, but it's just bleaching out the slides a bit much. You can't really see what's going on. There we go. How's that? Is it still OK for video? Excellent. Now, cancer treatment is changing really rapidly, and what I'm going to tell you about is just some of the stuff that's going on around the world, but also what contributions we're making locally. And the contributions we're making locally depend on students and the postdocs who help supervise them. So this is some of my group a few years ago when we had a retreat up the coast a little bit to talk about ideas. And after your undergraduate degree, you can come and join groups like ours and work with great people, particularly young people, who are further along in the chain than you, doing doctorates and things. So the thing we're particularly excited by at the moment are the changes in cancer therapy, and cancer is still an absolutely dreadful disease at the moment, but it's changing really fast. And there's genuine hope that cancer is curable. And we can see that in some patients already who are being cured by the latest therapies. And fortunately for your generation as students, cancer is going to be a completely different disease by the time you are potentially going to suffer from it from what your parents have gone through. And potentially it's going to be a manageable chronic disease, much like arthritis or heart disease or some of the things that don't kill you immediately. And that's a wonderful thing. And part of the reason for that, major reason really is that immune therapy is taking off. Immune therapy for cancer is a genuine revolution in cancer care. It's a bit like shown in this revolutionary picture, the Bastille has been sitting there, cancer has been unassailable for quite a long time in many cases, and suddenly the walls are beginning to come down. And the reason for the excitement is this, there are new drugs that have suddenly turned up that are able to treat even the most advanced and rotten cancers, the kind of diseases like malignant melanoma, where if it spreads through your body, you typically have maybe six months to live and a miserable life at that. And patients who have tumours spread throughout their body, if they respond to this therapy, the tumours melt away over a period of months to a year. And most importantly, they stay away. And that's a really remarkable change just over the last few years. Crucially though, the problem at the moment is that this only works in a minority of patients who are treated. So some patients have these dramatic responses, but it's still only a minority. And some of the drugs that are doing this are things like the drugs announced here and the Herald for those of you that read newspapers. And a lot of publicity about these drugs over the last couple of years is the government's finally moved to fund these drugs. They're expensive, but highly effective in a small number of people. Now, the real revolutionary thing is that these drugs are not doing the same kind of thing as traditional chemotherapy. They're not targeting the cancer cells. This is a section, a little slice of a patient's tumour. And these individual blue blobs are individual cancer cells with their grain nuclei shown here. And traditionally, chemotherapy is targeted just those cells. The new thing is, the new therapy is targeting these cells that are found in some people's tumours. These are immune cells. In particular, there are a form of immune cells called T cells, which we'll come to in a moment. And that's a revolution. Now, a remixed audience, not everyone really knows what a cell is, so a little revision here. Cells, of course, are the building blocks of the body, and you know that you came from a cell because you know you came from a single cell embryo shown here. That's half from your mummy, half from your daddy, or as my kids would say, mainly mummy, because they think I had very little to do with them, which I guess is fair. And that single cell divides into two, and then two into four and four into eight. And eventually, in your adult body, you end up with a very large number of cells, 50 trillion. That's a very large number. We don't, though, all look like big blobs of that shape, and clearly something has happened to the cells as the cells have grown. And what happens is, of course, the cells on the outside of the ball decide they're going to turn into things like skin, and the cells on the inside of the ball decide they're going to turn into things like bone and muscle. And so in the adult body, you end up with about 400 different cell types, shown here as little slices through the middle of cells. And there's some fascinating cells, and here are the cells that form endothelium. They form blood vessels. They like to form tubes. Here are some cells with hairs on the top. They like to sweep mucous along your respiratory tract to help protect you from pathogens. And here's a little swimmy cell that only half of us make. Now, despite my fondness for that particular cell, it's not my favourite. My favourite cells are these guys. These are immune cells, and these are the kinds of cells that go around the body looking for trouble. They're looking for the things that can hurt you, and they help defend you against the baddies that are out there. And the particular cell that we're interested in is the T cell, but we can culture a lot of these different immune cells quite simply because we can find them in the blood. These cells go through the bloodstream to get out to the tissues to find baddies and kill them off. And so we can take a blood sample and we can purify a lot of these immune cells, including the T cells we'll talk about in a moment. What we can do is we can put them in a plastic dish like this, and we can cover them up with some nice nutritious fluid, pink fluid here containing vitamins and minerals and amino acids and sugars and things. And then we can stick them in a warm environment, which is an incubator, a nice, wet, warm thing, a bit like your body, 37 degrees and nice and full of fluid. We can look at them in the microscope, we can study them with various sophisticated techniques, and we can even freeze them down. We can cry or preserve them in particular medium that puts them in suspended animation for a period of time. We can then wake those cells up and study them later, and some cell lines that we've got that we've purified for patients we've been studying for 20 years, and we can keep waking them up, putting them to sleep, waking them up again. So immunology, the study of these kinds of cells is a fantastic thing to be doing because you can get the cells out of the human body and keep them alive. Now, I won't have escaped. You'll notice that this person is not your typical lab worker. This is in fact my daughter aged five years old when she came in to have a look at some cells. And here's Dan Verdon, who was doing his PhD at the time, now fortunately a graduate and has a postdoc position with us. And Medea and my other kids loved looking at cells, but actually it's got to be said they're pretty dull to look at when you first look down the microscope. Here's typically what you might see. This is about a tenth of a millimetre across. And these little blobs here are cancer cells stuck to the bottom of a plastic dish. And when you look at them, they don't really do much. They just sit there and they don't move very much. And you can see they're kind of transparent. They've got features to them, but not especially fascinating. Fortunately though, what we can do is we can film these guys and we can actually see how they interact with other cells using video time-lapse microscopy. And so what I'm going to show you in a minute is these cancer cells interacting with some of these immune cells that can harm the cancer. And these cells are called T cells. And they're capable of killing the cancer cells, as we'll see. So when we roll the video, you can see that these cells are staying still, but these guys, these are the T cells, the immune cells, and they're moving around the body and around the well just as they move around the body. And they interact with those cancer cells very briefly for a period of a few minutes and then suddenly bam, these crazy things start to happen to the cancer cells. What's happened to these cancer cells as they bled is they're actually undergoing a programmed cell death. This is a program being activated inside the cell by the T cells, which makes the cancer cells die. And these T cells are actually good enough that they can bounce around in the cell culture and over a period of hours they can kill several tumor cells in one go. And we can study how they do that, and we can study the molecular biology behind that. And in fact, this video was made by a master student, Monica Booth, when she was doing her studies. Now, what's actually happening inside the cell is the T cells carry with them toxic granules, and what they do is they inject those into the cancer cells, and they inject them by making a contact point with the cancer cell and forcing some of those granules inside the cancer cells. That's what triggers the death process. Now, in fact, that picture I showed you before of cancer cells inside a real patient sample, so this is a slice of a tumour from a patient. These melanoma cells are all fine. This one here that has a T cell right up against it is undergoing exactly the same cell death process you just saw in the video. And we know that because it's got these holes in it, these blebs, and its nucleus is breaking up. So we know in many, many patients that T cells can get into the tumours and they can kill the tumours. Which raises the immediate question, why don't the T cells win? In other words, if these T cells are so good at killing the cancer cells, why do the patients still have cancer? Over the last few years, we've really realised a lot of reasons for that, but the dominant one is this. When the T cells get close to the cancer cells, they have stop buttons that start to pop up on the outside of them, and the cancer cells often press those stop buttons and switch the T cells off. So T cells can get into the tumours, but they get switched off in the tumours. And we know a lot of the molecular detail about this. We know the molecular detail about what the stop buttons are. There's a molecule called PD1 that's shown in green here. But we also know the molecules that push those buttons that the cancer cells have shown in red here, like the molecule PDL1, that's the counterpart of the PD1. And of course, the new drugs that won't surprise you, like Ketruder, Updivo, and now Ticentric, are drugs that block this process. And so by blocking that, switching off of the T cells, they re-energise the T cells, the T cells can go on. And in some patients, they can clear very, very advanced tumours and cure the patients, which is fabulous. The problem is, some people don't make enough T cells. So sometimes when we look at these tumours, there aren't T cells inside the tumours. There's no killing going on. And so it immediately raises the question, and those patients, they're not going to respond to these wonderful new drugs. We're going to have to make some more T cells inside their bodies. So the question is we've been asking over the last few years, can we stimulate cancer killing T cells inside the body? And secondly, can we purify cancer killing T cells and infuse them into patients? So we've been working for many years with Margaret Brimble, who's an outstanding medicinal chemist at the University. She's world-renowned for the work that she does. And she has helped us make some new vaccines to stimulate these T cells. What they allow us to do is take molecules that we know are inside cancer cells and tag them with an alarm system, an alarm signal that the immune system recognises and use those as vaccines. And when they're injected, they stimulate the T cells to grow and respond to that particular cancer molecule and kill off the cancer cells. And those alarm signals are derived from bacteria. So effectively what we're doing is we're taking a cancer molecule that hasn't been recognised and we're making it look bacterial so that the body wants to attack it. And this technology is now quite advanced and so we've just started, just this year, a company called SatVax, which is a United States company in collaboration with a drug development group over there. And just last week Margaret and I were over in San Francisco for the kick-off meeting for this company and these vaccines are being developed towards clinical trials, many of which will happen in New Zealand, which is fantastic. The second question was whether we could start to purify some of these cells that you saw in the video and actually purify them from patients and infuse them into the patients. And yes, that's feasible, but of course the lab that we're currently using to grow the T cells isn't really suitable. People are coming in and out. We're using some relatively unsophisticated chemicals to grow the cells and they're not licensed for administration to people. So what we need is we need a clinical grade cell culture facility and these used to be very, very difficult to develop. Used to have rooms of operating theater quality like air and a whole lot of controls on the rooms. But just over the last couple of years, various companies have developed these kinds of containment boxes where you can grow cells inside a controlled environment and they're safe for clinical use. So the university has just bought a system like this and it's waiting for installation in our labs and we're headed for clinical trials of cell therapy where we grow cells in this environment and infuse them into patients. And of course we're getting as well a little robot who looks like this, who will be doing all the cell culture. That's eventually going to happen, of course, but in the meantime this is going to be students, post-docs, growing the cells, not little robots. Now what we're really after doing is we want to create an immune system in a dish and we want to be able to take a patient's tumour, analyse the DNA, figure out what target molecules we should be hitting and grow T cells that can hit those targets in the system. And that sounds pretty ambitious. What we're trying to do effectively is we're trying to recapitulate this organ. This is actually single cells stained inside a lymph node. These are the glands that swell up under your arms and then your necks when you get an infection. And these are individual cells that are visualised again using some fantastic University of Auckland technology. This is a unique microscope that's up at the Med School. It allows us to do great 3D imaging. And we can see here the channels within the lymph nodes. We can see the individual cells. We can see the blood vessels. These are molecular, these are cellular factories. These are factories where T cells get made and they're very, very sophisticated cellular and molecular devices in the body. But we don't have to build the same kind of sophistication in here. We now know enough about the processes of growing T cells that we think we can replicate that synthetically in the lab. Now, that all sounds a bit mad and a bit ambitious and it probably is, but we've had a lot of confidence about our ability to do this kind of thing by another project that's going really well and that's growing human skin. What we've invented here is a new way of growing skin on a synthetic material here. That's a patch of skin, human skin that's been grown on some synthetic material that we've invented. It's got both layers of the skin when you section it. It's got the top flaky layer and it's got the lower leathery layer growing in it. And the technology we've invented allows us to scale the skin up to sizes about 20 by 20. And so we've formed a little biotech company to take that forward called Upside Biotechnologies. And that company is licensed in some unique things that we developed in the lab, unique cell isolation and culture methods. And they're so efficient that we can take a sample of skin no bigger than a 10-cent piece from a patient and in 25 days we can grow enough skin to cover the entire body. And that's very, very useful for burns therapy and other injuries. So we're taking this to clinical trials and burns. But as well we had to invent a unique mesh material as you saw in the previous slide and also a unique device for growing the skin which also happens to serve as a transport device for taking the skin from our lab off to the hospital. And all this work has really been done by Vaughan Fais who turned up to a postgraduate kind of fair like this, decided he wanted to do some postgraduate study, did a master's with us and then a PhD and then a bit of postdoctoral time developing this technology. He's now Chief Technology Officer of his own company Upside Biotechnologies still working in our lab but now able to take his technology forward which is absolutely fantastic. So here's where we're going, we're going to develop an immune system in addition, we'll probably have a novel device, novel materials and a novel process that'll go into this new system that we've got here and we hope to make huge progress in treating cancer as a result. So just to close, acknowledgements, first of all the fantastic funding we've had from all kinds of different places around the country but I particularly want to acknowledge the generosity of a wonderful donor who's contributed to this latest project and the university, as you have to know, is really supported by an incredible philanthropic network both in New Zealand and overseas who really support a lot of this work and these philanthropists are crucial to driving forward your studies and our work. But particularly I finally want to draw attention again to the team, this work doesn't happen without great students and great postdocs and that means you guys, we need you to be interested in this work, excited about it and willing to lend your time and your brains to these fantastic efforts. So basically it's an invitation, come join us, change the world. Thanks very much. Thank you, Rod. Cancer and disease are scary things. I don't know if you remember, when you were a kid, what were you scared of? You were scared of simple things when you were a kid and you get a bit older and you get scared of really complicated things and you get that older again, you get back to being scared of simple things and you kind of go through these cycles and you hit my age and you're kind of terrified of cancer. So actually this is really good news. Hopefully you get there before I'm in that age bracket but certainly it'll be before many of you in that age bracket. The university really values graduate research and graduate research and graduate study comes in all sorts of different flavours but the pinnacle of graduate study is the PhD. It's a research piece, you take ownership of it and the university recognises that in a number of ways. PhDs are supported by funding, PhDs get to work with incredible supervisors. One of the ways the university recognises the value that we place on the PhD as the pinnacle of our graduate study is that the vice-chancellor every year gives five awards to the best PhD thesis from that year and it's always a very, very competitive field. Our next speaker, give it a little bit of echo here, thank you. Our next speaker, won one of those vice-chancellers best doctoral thesis awards in 2014. She's a lecturer in biliteracy Pacifica in the School of Curriculum and Pedagogy. Her recent research interests and from Pacific learner success, identity construction and experiences of education. She's particularly interested in bilingual, biliterate, bicultural outcomes, teacher professional learning and development in second language, acquisition and biliteracy and mixedness in Maori, Pacific whanau and families. To share stories of education transformation from the Faculty of Education and Social Work, please welcome Dr Ray Cialata. Tener gautau gatoa, nga myhimahana, chi'n gautau i runga i'r cwpap o'r te rannu. Tener gautau, nga gai gweredol i'r tiniol. So what is transformation? Well, I looked it up in the dictionary and it says it's a marked change in form, nature or appearance. And so thinking about that, I was thinking about our English medium education system in Aotearoa for Maori and Pacifica students, it really needs transforming. And how do we know? How do we know it needs transforming? Well, because Aotearoa on the world stage of educational measurement has been found wanting. Having the largest gap between those who are achieving and those who are not. And of course, there are certain groups of learners who are over represented in that group who are not achieving. And so I've been very privileged to work in this space. I haven't been a researcher for very long. I'm a practitioner. I've been a teacher for many, many years. And so I kind of was just welcomed into this space. And I do want to acknowledge the university and the people who have supported me through this journey. Because I came into it as a teacher and I've moved through into becoming a researcher and a lecturer and I am privileged to do so. So, as Paikia Aparana in Whale Rider, Witi Ihemaita's book and film stated, she said, I come from a long line of chiefs. I'm not a prophet, but I know that our people will keep going forward all together with all of our strength. And that is our desire for Maori and Pacifica that we will go forward and that we will be successful within education as who we are. And so my work has been fundamentally about that. Pacific peoples in Aotearoa, New Zealand come from the linguistically and culturally rich, diverse islands of Timonanuiakua or the Pacific Ocean. Many, like myself, are descendants of mixed Maori, Pacific and Parkeha Paiadins. Many of the Pacific children now in primary schools in Aotearoa are second or third generation children of parents and grandparents who came in search of educational opportunities for their children. Some first generation pioneers came from island childhoods full of rich experiences, complex knowledge systems and with deep expressive language and cultural resources. Stories of the New Zealand schooling experiences reveal that these resources were not always validated, expected or utilised within the teaching and learning space. So what is it that needs transforming in the educational space? I only have time to tell you two stories and for you to hear two voices from my research. First, I want to tell you a pre-transformation story which is typical of many of the stories told by our parents and grandparents when they came to school in Aotearoa, New Zealand. It's a story that comes from research into mixed Maori, Pacific identity construction. This is not a story told by a parent or a grandparent but by a young man who experienced this as a 12-year-old, not so long ago. It's a story from the boy in the photos and shortly after his arrival in Aotearoa from Samoa, so I'll just tell you the story. When I was in Year 7, I was called Sam, the brown Sam in the class. There was another Pākeha Pālangi Sam in class, so there were two of us. In art class, we had to do a work of art. I used pastels to create a vibrant and colourful artwork of a mixture of Pacific floral and traditional patterns. A few weeks later, the art teacher, a mixed, a middle-aged Pālangi lady, came into class exclaiming that she had entered white Sam's artwork into a big inter-school competition and that he had won. At a formal assembly, we all watched Sam receive a certificate with congratulations from the principal and the art teacher and a prize pack of a phone, a phone card, credit, stickers and some other stuff. Pretty big deal at that age. It wasn't until the next art class when the winning artwork was shown that I realised it wasn't the other Sam's artwork. It was mine that had won. In shock, I went and told the art teacher that that was my artwork, not the other Sam's. All I had written on the back was Sam. She was dismissive of my shock, saying she just didn't know. When I asked her if I would at least get the prize pack for my artwork, she told me it didn't have anything to do with her and to talk to the other Sam about it. I approached him saying, you know, that's not your artwork, it's mine. That prize for that artwork is also mine. He sort of looked sideways and he said, well, I'm already using the phone but I can give you a phone card and discuss. I said I didn't want anything and I walked away. I couldn't help but thinking if the situation was reversed that maybe the teacher might have demanded that I restore the prize pack to the other Sam. Well, the boy who told that story still managed to develop resilience and went on to complete graduate and post-graduate study in film, media and television, Pacific Studies, anthropology and digital design. He won the prime minister's first Pacific Youth Award for creativity, which included a two-year internship at Weta Work Show and he's currently continuing his dream of creating digital products that tell our own ancient Pacific stories. So, there's a guy that we talk about in education, his name is Bourdieu, and he argued that if the knowledge, background and values that children receive from families match schools' values and priorities, then they'll profit from schooling. But if there's a cultural mismatch, they do not profit from schooling. Social inequalities and academic failure are perpetuated when schools do not adequately address this mismatch. So, the research that I undertock through my PhD study utilised a Samorn metaphor to talk about Pacific success, the Vaatele, or the double-hole deep-sea canoe. The Vaatele literally means big canoe or journeying canoe. It has two hulls, not one, and it was employed for deep-sea voyaging. To understand the metaphor in relation to Pacific learners and their experiences at school, the double-holes are compared with Pacific learners' journey through the schooling system as bilingual, bicultural people. One hull may be seen to represent the language, literacy, culture and worldview of home while the second hull is representative of the language, literacy, culture and worldview of school. So, it's our dream and desire that through the research work that we are doing and the work that we're doing with many teachers who are doing amazing work in schools, that our Pacific young people will see that they can be successful at school as who they are and that what they bring with them will be central to that academic success. So, initial research undertaken over two years through a national literacy project with teachers, schools and professional development facilitators enabled us to develop specific dimensions of effective practice for Pacific learners in English medium classrooms. And the research demonstrates that if teachers employ these dimensions in their practice, their Pacific children were enabled to be successful in both worlds. Teachers who were expert at explicit language and literacy teaching across the curriculum also enabled their Pacific children to see themselves represented in the valued knowledge of school. The children were able to maintain and utilize their own linguistic resources and to be successful in both domains. So, the development of that initial work led in literacy led to a contract with the Ministry of Education to support development of Pasifika dual-language texts as well as professional development for teachers in utilizing the texts and in enabling their children to utilize the language and cultural resources that they came to school with. So, we piloted with Ngangana Samoa or Samoan English texts in 2014 and with texts from the other four main Pacific languages in 2015 and 2016 with a significant number of teachers and their children. So, the other languages include Te Reo Kokiairani, so that's Kokailun's Māori, Ranghau Nwé, that's Nwéan, Whakatokelau, which is Tokelauan, and Whakatonga, which is Tongan. So, these books are now available to schools and they have become a catalyst for teachers to begin to open up the classroom space, to enable it to become bilingual and multilingual, and the impact of that has been quite amazing. And so, here are some examples of the dual-language texts in Samoan showing change over time and text complexity. And we collected reading data from 114 Samoan children involved in the initial pilot and they all showed significant gains not only in Samoan but in English. So, reading in Samoan had a major impact on their reading in English, which is consistent with the research all over the world. So, the Ministry launched the Pacific dual-language text website in December 2016, it's relatively new, and teachers are now able to download digital versions of the text as well as professional development modules to support their practice. So, the second story that I'll just quickly tell is from a teacher who participated in the professional development project and she learnt how to utilise Samoan dual-language text with the Samoan children in her class. She herself was not Samoan, but she felt enabled to take risks. And this happened through the facilitators taking a co-constructed approach to professional learning and development where teachers and facilitators problem-solved together around how best to do this, how to work it out in the classroom, how it might be enacted in practice. And here is what she said. The bottom line is I failed this child and I've changed. Now I'm really emotional about this because if I failed him, how many other children have I? I've noticed that every single one of my children is now moving and this has all taken part in the last month or so. It's happened. I'm proof of that and I'm such a happy person because of that. Often we think we know it all. Actually we don't. I used to think I was a damn good teacher and you woke me up on that day. I had to have a really good check of myself and my teaching practice and what was working and what wasn't. And to this day it's affected me greatly. Now this program we're doing, oh my goodness, did you listen to those children? Did you hear the confidence? They are teaching me so much. They are so happy to do this. Their language, their lifestyle, everything about them as a person is being acknowledged and accepted in our classroom and I've actually got goosebumps just thinking about it because it's changed them, it's changed them and it has changed me. Pretty powerful, isn't it? It's a teacher's voice and her own learning. And so what we've found is that research can have a major impact in changing the way schools operate. It can have a major impact through changing teacher practice and it can enable Pacifica children and their families to see their valued knowledge and linguistic resources validated and utilised with an English medium education. Ultimately it's about this, that the culture of the child cannot enter the classroom until it has first entered the consciousness of the teacher and perhaps it's a fitting thing to finish with the words of one of our first Maori graduates and politicians. You know who he is, he's on our $50 note. Anybody know? Sir Apirana Ngata. And he had a political science degree from Canterbury and a law degree from Auckland and was the first person in Aotearoa, New Zealand, Maori or Parkeha to gain double degrees. He was fully successful in both the world of the Parkeha and until Maori. This is our dream for our children and grandchildren. And this is what Sir Apirana Ngata said. Grow and branch forth for the day's destined to you, your hands to the tools of the Parkeha, for the welfare of your body, your heart to the treasures of your ancestors as adornments for your brow, your spirit to God who made all thanks. Kia ora, thank you. Thank you Ray, that was beautiful. I think what Ray illustrated there is that research is transformational. It's transformational for the people undertaking the research. It's transformational for the people who can take up that research. I'm going to be super indulgent now because your talk made me think of one particular thing, your teacher's voice who said they have taught me so much. As a lecturer in this institution, it's the students who teach us as much as we teach you. The symbol here is the symbol of Ako Aotearoa, the tertiary education academy of New Zealand. Ako captures that idea that we teach each other. That continues when you continue with postgraduate research and more and more you become the teacher and your supervisors and colleagues become the people that you teach. So one last speaker and the closest and contemporary to you. This is a PhD student who handed in the final copy of his thesis today. He's done. He is, in all but name, a doctor. Originally he completed a Conjoint Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Engineering degrees at the University of Auckland, of course, in 2012 and he began his PhD in the Auckland Bioengineering Institute in the same year. His thesis focused on the development of user interfaces for brain-modelling software being developed at the laboratory for animate technologies. He's currently employed at Soul Machines, a company founded by his supervisor Mark Sager, one of our few academics to have won an Oscar, where he's working on further extending the software developed for his thesis. To talk about his role in creating expressive machines, please welcome Paul Robertson. I'd had to run down here and get that opened up. So I didn't actually remember I'd put quite so much about myself in my bio. It happens to line up quite nicely with some of the early slides in my talk, which if it starts up, there we go, good. The talk is alive. So, yeah, I'm working at a company called Soul Machines where a startup company founded about 10 months ago from the laboratory of animate technologies at the university and we employ about 40 people now, so it's really cool. We've grown pretty fast and I'll talk a bit more about how to do at Soul Machines, but since I am the recently finished doctor person type thing, or my supervisor called it, you can be called durr now, why am I here? I'm not a fantastic research lab leader type person, lowly recent PhD student and this is where the, I forgot, I told you all of this in my bio. I did a conjoint degree. The reason I chose to do a conjoint degree was partially because I find more than one sort of subject area interesting. Partially because I'm chronically indecisive. I didn't really know what I want to do. I still don't really know what I want to do. I'm here doing this now. Who knows? I wanted to keep my options open and that also influenced the decision to do engineering science as a specialisation because I'd heard that their graduates end up in any number of different jobs. You don't get channeled into sort of one specific thing. When I finished, I wanted to keep learning stuff or wanted to keep exploring stuff. Doing a PhD was sort of an obvious next step there. And again, in my introductory bio that I totally forgot I'd written. Look at that. User interfaces, visualisation, neural systems models. That's the really quick summary of the thesis. The full version is a bit longer and conveniently near the end of finishing up my sort of draft submission version my supervisor Mark Sagar decided he was going to found a company. So in terms of finding a job post-PhD that's possibly the easiest story you'll ever hear. I sort of just one day was no longer working as a PhD student and was just an employee and that was about it. That was really convenient, I've got to say. But since we're here to talk about postgraduate study, yes, the clicker worked. Let's focus a bit more on that arrow there. How did I get from undergraduate to postgraduate? So initially it was a sort of story with two flavours. One was it was really easy. The other was a little bit difficult and disappointing. Initially I wanted to go overseas and I was sending lots of emails everywhere and getting a lot of silence back. Sometimes turns out professors are really busy people and they aren't going to reply to every email they get. Sometimes they did and they said, great, where's your funding? What topic are you going to study? I don't know, I thought that was your job. No, apparently you have to actually think about that sort of stuff and you have to apply for scholarships last year always. So that was my initial experience of finding a PhD but then I saw a talk by this Mark Sagar fellow with some cool digital faces and thought, yeah, that's cool. I want to do that now. And his email address wasn't even listed on the university websites at the time I had to guess it. But I did and it was correct and he said, actually I am looking for PhD students and I have money which was, wow, that was much better than anyone else said to me. So that was the easy part after all of the soul crushing disappointment of silence. Anyway, let's talk a bit more about what Soul Machines does. Let's change the slide clicker. Come on, let's move things along here. Or not, oh, this is exciting. I would really like to show you the next slide but apparently we're not feeling that buzz down here. Oh dear, ah, here we go. It's alive once more. Good, so at Soul Machines, we're focused on humanizing computing for humanity, the big sweeping statement, but basically there's all this progress that's been made in making computers smart, artificially intelligent, but what we would really like to do is to make them emotionally intelligent, to give them the power to communicate, to express in a more human way than just simply robotic monotone or printing text to a screen. And so our focus is to bring those emotions, those expressive capabilities and sort of empathy into the artificial intelligence systems we have. And if the clicker works, we'll see an awesome next slide. The clicker is really slowing me down here. I'm feeling a little nervous about these slide transitions but there we go. I might just jump in and try and dim the lights so we can see this a bit better. If I click quality projection. Oh yes, the mood is set, perfect. So you can see three awesome faces here. I'm wandering in and out of the mic. I'll try not to do that so much. But these three faces, these are three characters, three avatars that we have at Soul Machines, Roman, Nadia and Rachel. Now these are all based on real people. So what we've got is we've got a system to do 3D scans to capture these faces and we turn them into these vessels, vessels that's a silly word, these vehicles maybe, these engines for emotional expression because the face is really the key to communication in humans. You think people say it's not what you said, it's how you said it. Were you frowning, were you smiling, were you giggling, giving them a cheeky wink, something like that. That is really a big part of communication that you're going to lose if you just have text, if you just have the good old Microsoft Sam, hello, how are you, kind of thing. So that's really, that's the crux of giving human, giving computers a human face is giving them the ability to express themselves in a human way and to build an emotional rapport with human users. Another cool thing about creating these faces as you can see is that you get identity from a face. A face is a big part of how you recognise someone is not someone else. It's pretty key there and giving computers unique faces is a tool to give computers an identity that we can sort of latch onto and empathise with. Now, another face that we haven't seen up here is the face of Baby X. Now, it seems like this is working now, it's good. Baby X, so I wasn't trusted with a live demo of Baby X. Apparently Baby X only likes its daddy, Mark Segar, and so I get a video of Baby X. Now, the cool thing with Baby X is we use it like an experimental way of studying models of learning. Now you can hear Mark encouraging it there. Yes. This is motor babbling. So Baby X is kind of like a real baby, just sort of experimenting with her ability to communicate, to make sounds, to make movements, and learns through encouragement, through positive reinforcement, just like humans do. So here we've got some very encouraging stuff here. But what we have is this innate human quality to try and mimic emotions and to try and mimic facial expressions and to try and associate them with emotions. And as I recall, I think we get about another 10 seconds of hours and room is here. Very good. So yes, there we go. The reinforcement is key. So we actually have simulated dopamine, basically acting as a reward for that. Yes. And the reason is we've built Baby X to have a simulated neural system. So it's not just a pretty face, it's actually got a pretty brain driving it as well. And you can get all sorts of different, I mean focused here, particularly on vision because vision is a very key part of interaction and computers usually have webcams. And we talked about that dopamine modulation. One thing we tried is teaching Baby X to play pong by rewarding random sort of action with that bat, rewarding, goodness, that's quite a reward there, rewarding successful hitting of the ping pong ball there. So making all the cool, pretty faces wasn't really what I did for my PhD. The engine behind the avatars, which we call BL stands for brain language, that was sort of more the area that I focused on. BL is something that we developed because humans are complex, making models of humans as complex. We need to be able to support paradigms and features and models from all these different areas. You can see, for example, neural systems, models, neural networks for the sort of lower level, really hardwired circuits, biomechanics, anatomy, physiology, getting the facial expressions to be based in realistic muscle movement, but also things like cognitive modeling, the sort of higher level psychological processes. And what I in particular focused on was visualizing the models. So we have these cool 3D visualizations. They're kind of as complex as real people in some senses. And one of those senses is if you've got something a bit wrong, it can be really hard to figure out exactly what's wrong just by looking at a face. So I needed to make a system that let us see in a sort of more schematic sense what is going on, how are things connected, how are they communicating, what's happening in real time. And now this is one thing, a piece of wisdom. You never ever do a live software demo. So let's see how that works out for me. So I am allowed to demonstrate this because this software I'm about to show you is in a slightly more virtual nutshell my PhD. This is what I worked on and it should take about another two seconds to boot up. So let's see if the live software demo will play a nice with us. There we go. So when I was finishing undergrad and doing some research over summer, I came to the conclusion that I wasn't quite as fast about the correct answer as I was about making pretty pictures. So this is a, I think this really sort of sums up that attitude drawn out to the full grandeur of a PhD. So what you're seeing here is I've taken the vision system from baby X in particular the motion detection and I have mapped it onto just a big population of neurons. So what you can see is the sort of simulated synapse is lighting up as I wave at the webcam there. So this is, you can see all these different features but basically this is a way of sort of schematically seeing how things are linked together, what's going on, bundling things together as if they were sort of synapses so you can get quite a cool color bloom there. And also, and this was another important part of my research was it's all well and good to see how things are linked together and all of that but what also can be really important is being able to basically start playing with different parameters in a simulation because these simulations, being as they are real people kind of, are about as complex as real people and it can be really hard to predict what's going to happen if you just change a number, save everything, stop, start again. Even if you're pretty sure you've got the right parameters, it's still a slow process. So the other thing that I was looking at doing is how can we try and make that happen while the simulation keeps running? So what we're seeing here is this motion and you see how as I move, the neurons that have been activated in relation to that motion get activated but then they kind of fade away. So that's just controlled basically by one parameter. So what I worked on was a way to actually edit this in real time. What would happen say if we made the neurons forget things a lot faster? So as I dial that up, you see I just fade away to be seen, I sort of show up but it's really got to get a bit of flail going there to sort of keep that going. At the other end, what happens if the neurons never forgot anything? So here I am trying to stay really still, but I move a bit and I move a bit more. You can see these synapses are getting pretty excited here too. Basically we've ended up with a complete sensory overload but if we bring it back to where it was originally, it all sort of starts dealing again. So how do we arrive at the exact parameter there? Well played around with a slider until it looked like you would expect it to look for a human. Cool thing is since we are humans, we can generally judge what it should look like if it is going to be correct for a human. So the live demo apparently worked. Let's see how long that continues. Unfortunately, I've missed my last slide. There we go. Great. So where do we go from here? What are we doing at Soul Machines? What do we think is going to happen in the future? Future is a tricky thing to predict. I wouldn't hold my breath about any of my predictions being right. The microphone agrees with me there, but what, for what it's worth, I think we'll see is anything for scientists. Oh, I hear myself on the microphone. Who could have really predicted that we'd go from glorified automatic calculator in a room to this thing in my pocket accessed the sum total of human knowledge and the entire back catalogue of cat videos. So it's really hard to say exactly where we'll end up, but the cool thing is it's not just up to me. Maybe you've got an idea now. You've seen something, not just in my talk. Everyone's talks. Maybe you've seen something and you think, yes, I want to learn more about that. So you hear people say, what are they going to do next? Oh man, there's all this stuff happening. What are they going to do next? So I've had a lot of fun and learned a lot doing my PhD, and I think it'd be really cool if people in this room helped create what we're going to do next, because ultimately what are we going to do next is a very big question. And I think that's an exciting thing to look forward to. Thank you. Oh dear. The microphone. The microphone. Just take that with you, because we've got questions coming up. You sit yourself down, mate. Thank you. Thank you for very brave to do a live software demonstration. Never work with animals, children or software. I would also like to say I'm fairly certain that our photocopier already has a personality. So if you could just sort that one out for us, I'd be really, really grateful. Now, hopefully what you've taken from the talk so far is that research really does work wonders. Every one of our speakers this evening so far has talked to you not about some abstract, pointy-headed ivory tower version of research. This is research that is having a real impact. Our first speaker showed you the impact that you can have on the political world, getting policies front and centre of our politicians. Our second speaker is fighting the fight against cancer. Our third speaker showed us how we could enhance educational outcomes for our Pacifica learners, and then we had our fourth speaker talking about putting the human into the human interface with machines, which is either super exciting or ever so slightly creepy if you get creeped out by that baby x thing like I do. But now we have the opportunity for you all to ask them some questions. So I'd like to invite all four of our speakers please to come and grab a very highly lit up seat. Now I guess what's going to happen here, because this always happens with anybody sitting in this particular type of room, I say, right, over to you any questions and everybody kind of shuffles and you've all been all struck into silence because these were very, very inspirational talks. But dig deep, I'm sure you've got some questions. If you're thinking about research or postgraduate study yourselves, don't feel limited to the topics that you've heard about. Ask our speakers anything about their own postgraduate journey. So do we have any questions? Go on, be brave, yes. Hang on a sec, there's a microphone coming just to make your life really miserable now. So how would we get access to get into research positions like this in the future after our graduations? That's a very good question. Speakers, which one of you would like to tackle that? Oh, I think you still might. Oh, no, something very good. I mean, you're too much. That's all about relationships, that I was very well supported by lecturers that I was working with and who really mentored me through my academic journey and provided some really good direction. So I don't know about other areas of the university, but certainly in education, there's a very strong mentoring culture. And I think it's all about research making a difference in practice. And so that was how it came about through... Just, actually, I was offered the opportunity to engage in research and that kind of took me down that pathway. So relationships are really important and to build good relationships with senior academics. I think if you don't find yourself with a lot of strong relationships with senior academics, though, you kind of do just have to start getting out there and saying, hey, I want to do something because anyone got something going. Like I said with my experience of there being a lot of radio silence, that's always a possibility. Try not to let it set you back, but I think also it can depend a lot on who you contact because I think some of the PhD students I've known, it was very much, there's a project for you. It's all kind of laid out. You just need to get in there and do that. Whereas with Mark Sagar, you can do anything and everything and you can find your own path, which of course meant when I said, do you want a PhD student? It was yes and then details, not relevant, just yes. Sure. And so I think it's important to also at least have some idea of what you want to do, but because some people have sort of projects that slot into their research direction, you can't be too fixed on, this is the exact thing I have to do because then you can find yourself having a lot of trouble finding someone who is willing to supervise that. Sure. I'd like to add a little something to that as well. What you start doing your PhD and if it's a PhD that is the route you take, what you start doing your PhD in doesn't set your route in stone. A PhD is a skill set as much as it is a project that you pursue. The project that you pursue is actually the vehicle for learning that skill set. So as Paul said, you either apply to all the people that you want to work with in the world and one of them gets back in touch and goes, yep, sweet. Or as Ray did, you have a particular passion and you drive that passion and everybody has their own story for how they get into where they got to. I just wrote to every single English speaking university in the world apart from America because you know, Trump, not then, but it was heading that way. And just some dude in New Zealand wrote back and said, yeah, sure, come and do a PhD. And I ended up doing a PhD in aluminium smelting and now my research is in chocolate. So, you know, you never know where it's going to take you, but it's a skill set that you can apply in a huge range of things. It's not just the pointy-headed I'm doing a project and that's all I'm going to do for the rest of my life. It's a gateway. It takes you to all sorts of places. I think in our space, in our department, you're going to start with an honours or a masters and then before you go on to your PhD and how you get into that route is varied. There are university systems where you can, you know, go looking for a supervisor and you can say, this is what I'm interested in and people will look at it. But in practice, it most often happens that you guys approach lecturers you like or people that you know of and say, you know, what do I need to do to come and work with you? And start a conversation. And sometimes labs can't take everybody that wants to be in them. You know, you may have to have some patience about that. But you'll find that researchers aggregate together and if you can't get into the precise to one quite close to the lab that you want to, maybe able to take you for honours. And the School of Biological Sciences is also a really great programme of summer studentships and that's an excellent way to get to know people. You get into the department, you spend your summer doing a research project with somebody you can meet everybody and that helps you build your contacts so that you can find somebody that you really want to be with. I think the other thing to say is for the PhDs, it's a much easier route if you can get your own scholarship and that actually does depend on grades. The university has this system whereby people with the top grades get offered a free ride effectively, not in the sense that your fees are paid and you get a stipend, it's not free for you obviously. So when you're done here, go back and study, okay? Pull a more lighter, get an A plus. But I've got to say in that context, it's really important to note not to be discouraged if your undergrad happens to be a little less than a stellar. Doesn't mean you're not going to have a great future in research. If you have the commitment particularly for people who have started university perhaps a little rough and then slowly got into it and really figured out that this is a life for them, quite often we see people whose grades are lifting and maybe with a B plus average or something like that, make fantastic researchers down the track. So don't be discouraged if you don't hit that top grade but then funding becomes slightly more difficult. You'll have to find a group that has some funding for you, particularly for the PhD. But if you really want to do it, you'll find a way and just get talking to as many people as possible about how to do it. No, just to put you all on your metal here and the online people are dialing in with questions. I didn't even believe there was actually anybody out there. So hi, all, both of you. So we've got some questions for each of you. Jennifer, you first. From somebody online out there in the wide world. How engaged slash apathetic do you think millennials will be in this election as compared to the 2014 election? I would have thought that they would be more engaged because I think generally that events like Brexit and Trump have really engaged people worldwide and I've heard even students, I know who were already engaged, so I think I need to go and get involved now, really get involved. So I would expect millennials to be more engaged, particularly with something like Vote Compass, we tend to find we get the young people involved because it's an online tool and it's designed to suit them. So I think they'll be more engaged than previously. Kelbyn, this person would also like to ask what you think the key policy issues will be for the public in this election round? I think it's quality of life issues. So it's things like transport, housing, jobs, opportunity, a sense that not everybody's able to get ahead as easily as they could, that the ladder might be a bit broken. So that's sort of the board issues, but the specific issues will be things like the infrastructure, the housing transport. And that sense of just not quite being able to get there as easily as we could, which isn't an issue as such, but that's just the underlying feeling. But I also think I can't predict it. What I mean by that is we're going to try and be very open to issues that might emerge. Because rather than try and have a fixed view, we think we know what New Zealanders are concerned about because I think there's underlying things that we haven't seen that haven't come on the agenda. I had to play with Vote Compass. And you answer the first set of questions and then you get the option to answer more questions, don't you? And I just kept going and it was like, oh, more questions, I'll need to answer more questions. It was all quite cathartic, in a way. So, Rod, this question has come in from online for you. I was interested in the synthetic skin you talked about. And I wonder what the uptake of the skin is in terms of being rejected or accepted. Now, I don't know if that means morally or physically. Now, I think you're talking about physical rejection, probably. And this is an autologous product as the word for it. It means it's made from your own cells. So, there's no rejection. Well, we are not anticipating any rejection when we get to clinical trials because we take a little sample of the skin from the patient who has the burn injury and then grow the cells from that. Wow, that's amazing. And the whole point is to accelerate the growth of the skin so that we can have it available for the surgeons when they need it, which is any time within the first few weeks because major burns take a long time to treat. Yeah, that's incredible. This is also for Rod, but I suspect, actually, this could be for any of you if you may interpret the context. If you could conduct any experiment with no time, money or ethical concerns, what would that experiment be? Goodness me. Well, the ethical concerns is... I'm afraid it's just not an issue. I'm not interested in doing things that are not ethical, obviously. But any experiment, the most exciting stuff to do is to treat people. That's really what we and our group really like to do. And so, if money isn't an object, unfortunately, because of the sum of the support we've had, it's beginning to get a bit easier for us, particularly the philanthropic support. Treating patients who have cancer is something that we really want to do. And helping patients who've got cancer. Because in the immune field, things have really moved beyond the dish and beyond the mouse. It's now about what happens in people when they have these treatments, and that's where we want to be. That's the time scale of clinical trials. I mean, how long does it take to go from the dish to pills that people take? A long time. So the vaccines that we've been developing have been four or five years in development in Margaret Rimbol's lab and our lab, and are now likely to go to clinical trials within 80 months or so, so it's a long time. But one of the limitations there is you have to discover something that's patentable and able to be a real treatment that can be commercialised. So that means you have to make unique discoveries, and that takes a little more. The next question is for Ray. So this is the last one we've got online at the moment, so you need to be ready to step in here, people. Ray, it was interesting to hear you talk about the link between children who are bilingual becoming better at that English. Can you talk a little bit more about that? So there's a very strong body of research about this, so we basically call it teaching for transfer and trans-languageing. And so traditionally we've always thought that in bilingual contexts we should keep languages completely separate, but a lot of the latest cutting edge research all around the world is saying, no, we shouldn't be doing that at all. We should be actually utilising one language to learn in another language as well, because all languages operate out of the same central processing think tank, so I was doing an activity tonight with my teachers in class where we were doing a running dictation, and so what helped them with the Tadil Māori component of the dictation was also working on the English component. So they were transferring in the process of doing the task. And so, I mean, the issue with Pacific students and Māori, of course, is issues around language loss is now having impact in academic achievement. So if we can continue to strengthen and build first language maintenance, we always see direct benefits for English language and literacy acquisition. Cool, thank you. We're getting close to running out of time, but if there are any other questions, we can certainly make time for those. So is there anything else, burning issue that you'd like to raise? Yes. He's close to respect science, Craig. No, Heather, it really just depends on having a fundamental science background one way or another. And increasingly, the collaborate networks we've got actually enable in a disciplinary research. So the Morris Wilkins Centre, we encourage chemistry and biology to come in together particularly. So often chemists will be doing projects which are about a fundamental biological question. And quite often, the chemists find it relatively easy to come and do some biological experiments as well. Biologists going into a chemistry lab is a slightly different thing. We tend to be a bit clumsy and a bit dangerous. But no, I think if you're asking about biomedical stream versus the BSC, they're both fine in our space. Any other questions? If not, we'll wind the evening up. I would like to just remind everybody, because you obviously got some interest in postgraduate study, that the postgraduate festival is running for another week and a half. This was the first of the headline events. The next one is next Wednesday. And it's a panel discussion. And the topic is dislocation in an age of connection. And how do new technologies and social media affect social integration? I think actually we can get all of our speakers back to talk about that one as well. Because you see there's aspects of everybody's research that speaks to everybody else's research. We are all interconnected in that way. So that said, thank you all very much for coming tonight. And I would ask you all to join me once more in thanking our amazing and inspirational speakers.