Falling Walls Lab Aotearoa New Zealand 2025 Jury

Jury Chair - Professor Phil Lester

Insect Ecology, School of Biological Sciences, Victoria University of Wellington

Professor Lester works at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, where his research is in population dynamics and ecology of social insects. The pathogens and parasites of honey bees, invasive ants and social wasps in the Pacific region are a particular focus. He is a Specialty Chief Editor for the journal Frontiers In Bee Science. Phil has been the recipient of both a Fulbright Senior Scholar Fellowship and a Royal Society Te Apārangi James Cook Fellowship. He has previously been Head of School for the School of Biological Sciences, and a prior President of the Entomological Society of New Zealand.

Professor Riz Firestone

Senior Research Officer, Centre for Public Health Research, Massey University

Professor Firestone is a Senior Researcher at Centre for Public Health Research. Her research involves investigations on social-cultural and health inequalities, specifically among young Pasifika people with non-communicable diseases in Aotearoa New Zealand. She also has a wider focus in co-developing community-based interventions with Pasifika and Māori communities to: (i) tailor interventions to ensure the community’s’ needs are met and; (ii) ensure the interventions are relevant, and adaptable for long-term uptake by people within their communities.

Outside of academic life, Riz has a passion for empowering others into healthier lifestyles through her pro-hobby group fitness career at one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s largest gyms, teaching Group Power classes (she is the Head Teacher for this programme), where she enjoys seeing people from all walks of life improve their lives through exercise. 

Veronika Meduna

New Zealand Editor for The Conversation

Veronika Meduna is the New Zealand editor for The Conversation, a not-for-profit media organisation working with academics to provide evidence-based news and current affairs analysis. She is an award-winning science/environment writer and broadcaster, with experience across all media publishing platforms. Before joining The Conversation, she produced and hosted a weekly science programme for New Zealand’s public broadcaster RNZ, for which she won several journalism awards, including the Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union’s prize for best documentary.

She has written several books on science, most recently Towards a Warming World, published by Bridget Williams Books, and Science on Ice: Discovering the Secrets of Antarctica, published by Auckland University Press and, in an international edition, by Yale University Press. Veronika contributes to other broadcasters and publications in New Zealand and internationally, including Science, the Guardian, Eos, NZ Geographic and the NZ Listener. 

Professor Volker Nock

Professor and 2019 Rutherford Discovery Fellow, University of Canterbury

Professor Nock is a Professor and 2019 Rutherford Discovery Fellow in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Canterbury.

He is a Principal Investigator with the Biomolecular Interactions Centre and the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology. From 2017 to 2020, he co-directed of the Biomolecular Interaction Centre. In 2019 he was awarded a 5-year Rutherford Discovery Fellowship to work on the "Electrotaxis and protrusive force generation in fungal and oomycete pathogens – Pathways to new biocontrol strategies". From July 2023 to February 2024, he led the Reconfigurable Systems (RS) Programme of the MacDiarmid Institute. 

His research interests include micro- and nanofabrication, surface patterning, microfluidics and Lab-on-a-Chip devices.

Winnie Switakowski

Deputy Head of Mission at the German Embassy in Wellington

Winnie Switakowski began her duties as Deputy Head of Mission at the German Embassy in Wellington, New Zealand in July 2023. Originally a trained conference interpreter, she joined the Federal Foreign Office in 2013 and has since served in the department for cultural diplomacy and society, in the German Embassy in Warsaw, as an exchange officer at the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Warsaw and as part of the staff of former Federal Foreign Minister Heiko Maas and current Federal Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock. Winnie is married and has two daughters.

Jury assessment of presentations

The Jury will assess the presentations based on the following criteria:

• Breakthrough factor – Does the project have originality and potential for innovation?
• Relevance/scope of impact – How relevant is the idea for the discipline and beyond, and what is the likely impact?
• Structure/performance: Is the presentation well structured, how convincing was the presentation?

View more information on the scoring and the weighting of each criteria.