Welcome To MESA!

MESA is committed to the development of MacDiarmid Institute students and postdocs through exposure to the Institute’s skills, knowledge and ideas. We work to foster young New Zealand scientists by encouraging interdisciplinary approaches and establishing new networks within the institute and the broader community.

1. Workshops & Seminars: MESA organizes full-day workshops and shorter seminars, covering science topics (e.g., spectroscopy and synchrotron workshops) and broader topics of relevance to researchers (e.g., entrepreneurship, economics). We also run events in novel formats, such as an annual 3-day ‘bootcamp’ workshop and hands-on experimental physics. These are complemented by online guides featured on our website, such as how to give a great presentation and an introduction to programming in Python.
2. Opportunities & Careers: By helping set up opportunities such as the MacDiarmid Research Commercialization Fellowships for students and postdocs, we aim to provide relevant NZ-based career paths for emerging researchers. This is complemented by alumni videoprofiles, a guide to external listings, to scholarships, and to life in academia, and ties in with plans for upcoming career workshops.
3. Networking: With NZ’s nanotechnology and advanced materials research spread out across the country, our universities’ students and postdocs sometimes lack a sense of community and strong networks. MESA aims to address this through events such as our workshops, seminars and extended multi-day events, highlighted every year by the MacDiarmid Student & Postdoc annual symposium. We are also working to establish a strong MacDiarmid alumni network, an effort started with our videoprofiles.
4. Outreach: MESA seeks to encourage public interest and participation in nanotechnology and advanced materials, through opportunities like those noted here. We do this through grassroots efforts, such as participation as panelists in meet a scientist sessions for children (NZ’s next generation of scientists) and their teachers. Additionally, we are active on social media, namely our blog, Twitter feed, our Facebook page, our Flickr photo stream and the Sciblogs podcast. Check out our outreach demonstration examples too!