SpaceBase co-founders Eric Dahlstrom and Emeline Paat-Dahlstrom. Winners of the Friends of NZ Award at the 2023 Kea World Class Awards. Photo / Jason Oxenham
The Kiwi Expat Association (Kea) revealed its 2023 World Class winners at an event in Auckland last night (see the full list below).
Kea celebrates New Zealanders making a splash on the world stage and, with its Friends of New Zealand gong, expats helping to give NZ a lift.
This year’s Friends of New Zealand award went to SpaceBase founders Eric Dalstrom and Emeline Paat-Dahlstrom. The couple immigrated to NZ six years ago, each on a Sir Edmund Hillary Fellowship, at a time when Rocket Lab had yet to launch its first Electron rocket.
SpaceBase created a directory of the surprisingly large number of firms involved in New Zealand’s space industry and consults venture capital firms, local councils and others who want to get involved in the sector. It also supports education and research initiatives, including SpaceBase’s current Space for Planet Earth Challenge 2023 - where applicants can win up to $25,000 in cash and mentorship support for proposals to use space technologies to reduce the greenhouse gas methane.
New Zealand aerospace firms have been targeted by Peace Action and other groups who object to contracts with US and Australian defence agencies. That’s something SpaceBase’s founders are likely to encounter again next week.
Organisers of the New Zealand Aerospace Summit 2023, to be held in Christchurch on September 11 and 12, have alerted attendees that they’re aware the event will be targeted by groups “concerned about the provision of goods/services to defence forces, the environmental footprint of the aerospace industry, and the legislation that governs this activity”. There would be mandatory bag checks and possible delays.
Dalstrom told the Herald that New Zealand’s space industry had an international reputation for its focus on developing more sustainable solutions.
Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck - whose firm recently set up a dedicated military and intelligence subsidiary - earlier noted that various military-backed technologies developed in space, including GPS, were dual use and had proved a public good. His firm only supported research, not operational projects.
Dalstrom took a similar line, saying: “I draw the distinction between technology demonstrations in space that are approved by the New Zealand government, but they’re not weapons and they’re not war-fighting capability.”
He said all of Rocket Lab’s manifests (and anyone else who ultimately launches satellites from here) have to be approved by the NZ Space Agency, which applies national interest and safety tests, and its minister (currently Barbara Edmonds, as the Minister of Economic Development; the NZSA sits within MBIE). Rocket Lab’s new military contract-focused subsidiary is registered in the US, and will only launch from the US, limiting NZ regulators’ input.
This year’s judging panel featured former Governor-General Sir Jerry Mateparae, Entrepreneurs Sarah Robb O’Hagen and Guy Royal, 2022 KeaSupreme Winner Miranda Harcourt, Kea Global Co-Chair Mitchell Pham and NZTE Board Director Jennifer Kerr.
Here are the 2023 winners, and the judges’ comments.
Oceania Curator, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Maia Nuku is the first Indigenous Pacific person to ever hold a curatorial position at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Nuku is currently working on a major re-installation of the Met’s Oceania galleries. She is recognised globally as one of the leaders in her field and regularly connects with other museums to offer advice and inspiration, and speaks on the topic of indigenous art.
She is a passionate advocate for Māori and Pacific art and ensuring it is treated respectfully when being showcased on the world stage. Nuku looks after a collection of over two thousand works of Pacific art and is globally recognised as being one of the leading experts in Oceanic art and is a driving force behind telling the stories of these pieces in a new and more modern way.
Nuku is Ko Ngaitai te iwi, from the East Coast near Whakatāne. Her mother Esther Jessop sailed on a ship called the Rangitoto to London in 1958 where she met and married her English father, Jeff. Ester became a founding member of Ngāti Rānana, the London Māori club. Her mother recently received an honour from the Queen’s honours list for the work she’s done over the years hosting delegations of Māori and Pacific and leading meetings and whaikorero and huis and raising cultural awareness of Maori practises on the world stage.
Mountaineer, public speaker, Limbs4All founder
Inglis is a New Zealand mountaineer, researcher, winemaker and motivational speaker. He is also an accomplished cyclist and, as a double leg amputee, won New Zealand’s first cycling medal at a Paralympics - a silver medal in the 1km time trial event at the 2000 Summer Paralympics in Sydney. He is the first double amputee to reach the summit of Mount Everest. In addition to being a goodwill ambassador for the Everest Rescue Trust, Inglis has created a New Zealand-based charitable trust Limbs4All. He has also created a range of sports drinks and energy gels named PeakFuel.
Inglis started work at Mt Cook as a search and rescue mountaineer. In November 1982, he and climbing partner Philip Doole became trapped near the summit of Mt Cook in a storm lasting 13-and-a-half days. The resulting stay in the ice cave - now known as Middle Peak Hotel - resulted in both men almost losing their lives. Mark was forced to change his career as a result of the loss of both his legs to frostbite.
Inglis is the author of five books and was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to persons with disabilities at the Queen’s Birthday Honour Awards in 2002. He is also a leading motivational speaker who has presented to over 200,000 people across the world. Much of his time is spent in India, consulting to the country’s top executives, focusing on change, challenge and the role of attitude in business. Inglis leads one to three treks to Nepal each year to raise funds and awareness for Limbs4All projects in Nepal and Cambodia which aims to give artificial limbs to people who would not otherwise be able to access them.
Leading Educational expert, founder of The Learner First
After years of working for the Ministry of Education, Joanne McEachen founded her company The Learner First, which takes the principles of New Zealand education to schools around the world. The Learner First is based on community principles of learning and teaching children about themselves and who they are first, before focusing on grades. While this sounds straightforward to many Kiwis, it was a radical concept in the US and took several years to catch on over there, the results were immediate and huge - the US school that ran the pilot saw a big drop in absentee rates and a significant increase in testing scores.
McEachen moved home to New Zealand in 2020 and founded the Kia Kotahi Ako Charitable Trust to address educational, climate, and other important challenges facing Papatūānuku. Her insights are illuminated by continued, hands-on experience partnering with multiple countries, school communities, and students from around the world. She is about to move back to Seattle to be closer to family and her grandchild.
She is co-author of Deep Learning, a book that has claimed the attention of educators and policymakers around the world. This book not only defines what deep learning is, but takes up the question of how to mobilise complex, whole-system change and transform learning for all students.
McEachen has worked to bring about purposeful opportunities for Māori including founding the Kia Kotahi Ako charitable trust. The charitable trust works to tackle both issues relating to the world’s climate crisis and an inequitable education system.
Social entrepreneur and founder and CEO of sustainable beauty brand Ethique
Brianne West is passionate about protecting and restoring our environment and believes business should benefit everyone involved, from suppliers, to the team - not just shareholders. In her second year of a Bachelor of Science degree at Canterbury University, West worked out how to create solid shampoos and realised there could be a business in it. After attracting an initial investor through a pitching competition run by UC, and a highly successful crowdfunding campaign, Ethique was born in 2012.
West has since developed more than 30 solid beauty bars including solid shampoos for different hair types as well as conditioners, cleansers, scrubs, moisturisers, serums, a self-tanning bar, household cleaners and even a pet shampoo. Ethique (pronounced Eh-tique) is the French word for ‘ethical’.
The firm, which uses compostable packaging, has prevented more than 25 million plastic bottles from being made and disposed of in landfills and prevented over 600,000kg of carbon emissions.
Ethique incorporates other socially responsible initiatives in its business plan, such as empowering local communities, paying living wages and contributing to charities.
Ethique is New Zealand’s highest ranking BCorp, living wage certified, carbon positive, plants one tree for every order and donates 20 per cent of annual profits to charity. Ethique’s Super Soap Project has donated 30,000 bars of soap since April 2020 to vulnerable communities across New Zealand and the South Pacific in response to Covid-19.
West was named a Top 100 Global Thinker by Foreign Policy magazine in 2016, the 2019 NZ EY Young Entrepreneur of the Year and Ethique Concentrates was in Time’s 100 Best Inventions of 2020.
Medical research scientist specialising in molecular immunology
Cristin Print is based at the University of Auckland (UoA) where he leads a cross-disciplinary research team of clinicians, biologists and data scientists using genomics, systems biology and bioinformatics to better understand human disease, especially cancer.
In 2022, Print received the top award for cancer research in Aotearoa. The New Zealand Society of Oncology (NZSO) Translational Research Award is given annually to “an eminent New Zealand investigator who has made outstanding contributions to translational cancer research”.
Print is leading a project using genomic data from 100 Auckland cancer patients to investigate how therapies can be better targeted.
Print is passionate about how we best use and work with indigenous health data - especially of Maori and Pacific people here in NZ. He currently co-leads the Rakeiora national genomics infrastructure programme in partnership with Māori leaders.
The project aims to obtain a full picture of DNA sequence variation within te ao Māori, that would be used as a diagnostic resource. At the moment most DNA mapping is of European or increasingly Han Chinese populations, with limited applicability to Māori and Pacific populations here.
Print also has a gene named after him as he was part of early work to discover and map the human genome.
Founder and Director of Women Together, co-founder of Covid Courage
Born and raised in Taranaki, Natasha Anushri (Anu) Anandaraja is an educator, paediatrician, and public health practitioner.
She worked with international NGOs on child health and disaster relief before moving to New York City in 2002, where she trained in Pediatrics, Global Health and Public Health at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai - where she later became Director of Global Health Education at Mount Sinai from 2008 until 2016. In this role she partnered with NGOs, government agencies and under-resourced communities to establish maternal and child health programs in low-income settings. She was director of the Office of Wellbeing and Resilience at Mount Sinai from 2018 until October 2020.
After filing a federal case against Mount Sinai for sex, age and race discrimination in 2019, Anandaraja and her seven co-plaintiffs formed Equity Now, a platform for women to speak about discrimination in the healthcare system, and advocating for gender equity in healthcare.
Her case was dismissed, but she filed a new complaint in NY State court. As a member of Equity Now, Anushri uses this legal case and advocacy work to demand a change in institutional culture and processes to benefit all healthcare employees.
When the pandemic hit, Anandaraja founded Covid Courage to address the shortage of PPE in NYC hospitals. From March 2020 to December 2023, the non-profit mobilised volunteers and donors to procure and distribute over 30,000 pieces of PPE to healthcare facilities, schools, mutual aid organisations, and essential workers in communities across New York and New Jersey.
In 2017, Anandaraja created Women Together Inc - an organisation that connects women across boundaries of geography and culture, catalysing local and global transfer of knowledge and skills, and honouring women as educators, innovators and change-makers.
The council has also been served with judicial review proceedings.