Our People
SCANZ is run on behalf of its members by the Executive Committee, a set of volunteers who are responsible for organising the strategic plans, events and publicity relating to SCANZ.
SCANZ Executive Committee
Katharina (Kati) Doehring - President
Nina Vidović - Secretary
Mike Kilpatrick - Treasurer
SCANZ Executive Committee
Kati Doehring - President
Dr Katharina (Kati) Doehring is a science communicator and freshwater ecologist at the Cawthron Institute, Aotearoa New Zealand's largest independent science organisation. Kati is passionate about creating meaningful, positive impacts, particularly by empowering people to take action in restoring and protecting New Zealand’s freshwater environments. With a PhD in Science Communication, she specialises in using storytelling to make complex science accessible—particularly in the context of freshwater restoration. Kati is dedicated to connecting people and fostering inter- and cross-disciplinary collaborations, and she is excited to grow these connections both within and beyond the Science Communicators Association of New Zealand (SCANZ) as its president.
Nina Vidović - Secretary
Nina holds down several science comms gigs, including as Comms Manager at Wellington UniVentures and Senior Science Comms Advisor at the Earthquake Commission, as well as running a consulting and contract writing business.
She studied biology and maths at Canada's University of Waterloo, during which she worked in toxicology, genomics and physiology labs before realising she much preferred writing about other people's research over doing it herself. This led her to a career in comms and a Masters of Science in Society from Te Herenga Waka –Victoria University of Wellington. She loves helping researchers bring their science to new audiences.
Mike Kilpatrick - Treasurer
Mike is a Scottish-born former scientist, who retrained as a journalist at AUT after immigrating to Aotearoa.
After stints as a sports and technology journalist and taking charge of the Microsoft News website in NZ he switched to a communications role at AUT, where he now looks after academics in the Faculty of Health & Environmental Sciences.
He finds this job a much better fit to his skills compared to his days running HPLC and GC machines in a chromatography laboratory.
Andrea Liberatore
Andrea is the Associate Director for the New Zealand International Science Festival. She has a background in biology and environmental education and has worked as a museum science communicator and a researcher at the University of Otago’s Centre for Science Communication. She finds joy in providing engaging science experiences to people of all ages and backgrounds.
Catherine Kirby
Catherine is the Communication and Relationships Manager for Eco-index where she enjoys the challenge of translating and sharing interdisciplinary research and digital public goods.
Catherine started out in terrestrial ecology research and consulting before being drawn to the creativity of science communication. One of her first serious forays involved writing a field guide for the plant species that she studied during her MSc, to address the issue of fragmented information. Catherine then had a hair-brained idea to replicate a National-Geographic style tree portrait in the depths of Pureora Forest; a successful, collaborative project which celebrated the majesty of our own forest giants and got her hooked on communicating all things science.
Jana Makar
Based at the University of Auckland, Jana Makar is the Communications Manager for New Zealand eScience Infrastructure (NeSI). She has also worked as a communications professional for multiple organisations in Canada’s cyberinfrastructure sector, from provincial research & education networks to national high performance computing platforms.
She sits on the Women in High Performance Computing Australasia Chapter (WHPC AusNZ) Organising Committee and is working to build community amongst other communications practitioners across Aotearoa’s computational research sector. She has a degree in Communications from the University of Calgary and spent the early part of her career working as a newspaper journalist.
Katrin O’Donnell
Lesley Stone
Lesley is a natural scientist with decades of experience leading or supporting sustainability and environmental programmes within and beyond Aotearoa NZ. Communication through storytelling has long played a significant role in her advocacy, teaching, research and professional practice.
As sustainability manager for the University of Auckland, she and her team used aspirational stories to communicate staff and students’ contributions to sustainability. In 2019 and 2020, their stories contributed directly to two consecutive, first-in-the-world placings in the international Times Higher Education rankings for sustainable development impact.
A life-long learner, Lesley is currently enhancing her multi-media storytelling skills through Otago’s science communication programme. She's delighted to have the opportunity to contribute to SCANZ’s journey.
Melanie Newfield