Supervisor Dr Ayo Fasoro (left) and student Kathy Nam (right) and her poster on ‘Trends and implications of housing tenure of older adults’ with Joan Smith from the Rotary Club of Wellington, which provided funding for the project.
Forty students were able to get a taste of what life is like as a researcher at this year’s Summer Studentship research programme at the University of Otago, Wellington – Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka, Pōneke.
This year’s students were based across both the Wellington and Palmerston North campuses, taking on a diverse range of research projects, looking at topics from the trends and implications of housing tenure of older adults to fertility services for patients receiving cancer treatment.
They were supported by funding from a large number of external sponsors and supervised by academics from a range of disciplines across the University, from public health, to medicine and surgery, psychological medicine and radiation therapy.
The Associate Dean Research on the Wellington campus, Associate Professor Kirsty Danielson, acknowledged the generous support provided by the 18 external sponsors, without which the summer studentship programme would be unable to operate.
“We’re really grateful to have the financial support, but also for the opportunity the programme gives us to build connections with community funding organisations.
“It provides such great learning opportunities for our students, many of whom may well go on to careers in research.”
The 10-week programme finished with a poster competition on 24 January, where students were able to present their work to the three judges: Associate Professor Kirsty Danielson; Research Manager Rhiannon Sexton; and researcher and Emergency Department Registrar Dr Alice Rogan.
The winner was Radiation Therapy student Keita Ormsby (supervised by Aidan Leong and Kate Chadwick) for her project on the opportunities and risks of generative AI to support the information needs of cancer patients undergoing radiation therapy.
Highly commended were Shauna Gray (supervised by Dr Carolyn Clark) for her audit of Wellington renal transplant planning practices; Billy Moore (supervised by Dr Chloe Campbell) for his work on analysing medicines-related communication in hospital discharge summaries; and Caroline Yee (supervised by Dr Mary Buchanan) for her work exploring the housing experiences of children with disabilities and their whānau.
One of the students, Rahul Rahubadde (supervised by Dr Tony Lin), has been invited to present his poster on the effectiveness of anastomotic reinforcement on adverse outcomes at the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons Annual Scientific Conference in Sydney from 3-6 May. He received support for his summer research project from the Surgical Research Trust.
Student Rahul Rahubadde with his poster.