2025 MESA report - Annual Report 2025

6 July, 2026

Building on the success of last year, the MacDiarmid Emerging Scientists Association (MESA) has further increased the number of events run across the country, with 29 events held to date.

This year, we found that casual catch-ups over coffee, tea or even bubble tea gained the most attraction in bringing our members together and fostering networking. Each centre has run at least two of these, along with one to two workshops focusing on soft and hard skills. The workshops ranged from X-ray diffraction to Python for data analysis, as well as oral and visual communication. Additionally, some of our members from Te Papaioea Palmerston North and Pōneke Wellington had the chance to visit Marama Labs, a start-up company originating from the Raman Laboratory at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington (VUW).

This year's bootcamp was back in the North Island at a camp in Taupō. The theme encompassed material characterisation spanning NMR, XRD, Raman, synchrotron, and neutron science.

MESA committee at the MacDiarmid Institute annual symposium.

One of our goals this year was to boost our social media presence, which we can happily say we have achieved. We have created 133 posts, resulting in a 280-follower increase across all our platforms. A special thanks to our social media reps for doing an exceptional job with posts covering all our events.

Another goal was to boost engagement at our events, as previous years' engagement had been a small percentage of the total number of members based at each of our centres. Across all our events up to November, we have had 397 attendees, which is the highest attendance in the last four years. We hope that all our members who attended were able to learn new skills or expand their scientific network, and we look forward to seeing you continue to engage with us next year!

This would not have been possible without all our amazing centre representatives and executive committee members organising and running these events for our members to enjoy. Thank you for all your hard work throughout the year. We hope you managed to gain something from the role.

Thanks for an amazing year!

Marco Vas and Campbell Tiffin signatures