Post Graduate Students' Association - PGSA

Benefits of becoming a Waikato PGSA member:

• Make contact with other postgraduate students
• Support of the executive as your voice on campus
• Form multi-disciplinary links in the university
• Keep informed of relevant issues to postgraduate students
• Free membership with the Waikato Student's Union (WSU). (Note: if you do not wish to be enrolled as a WSU member, please let us know in the comments section below)

Executive

Meet the members of our executive

Co-President: Fai Tongdethsri

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

Fai is currently a second-year PhD student in Political Science. Her research topic focuses on notions of sustainability in climate change adaptation policy in Thailand. She is a Golf Scholar on the Sir Edmund Hillary Programme and as a recipient of the Step Higher Award has fundraised for the Himalayan Trust and trekked in Nepal. Through her cultural clubs, outdoor/sporting activities and volunteering work she enjoys interacting with people. Although she is of Thai ethnicity and an avid traveler, she finds NZ as her base.

Co-President: Carlos Romero Villarreal

School of Engineering

Carlos is a PhD student in the School of Engineering. He came to New Zealand in 2016, after finishing his bachelor and master’s studies in Spain. His research is focused on increasing the lifetime of affordable titanium alloys under cyclic loads. He is interested in aerospace, mechanical and materials engineering, especially in the fields of processing and mechanical behaviour of structural materials and biomaterials.

Treasurer: Daniela Aguilar Abaunza

Faculty of Law

Daniela Aguilar is a PhD student in the Faculty of Law. She is from Colombia and came to New Zealand in 2017. She is currently researching the role of law in emerging technologies which enables electricity consumers to produce and manager their own electricity needs. Her area of interest includes energy law and policy and the mining sector.

Secretary: Sam Campbell

Faculty of Law

Sam is a PhD candidate at Te Piringa Faculty of Law. His research involves the comparative study of transnational and domestic river basin governance regimes. Prior to commencing doctoral studies at the University of Waikato, Sam worked as a commercial solicitor in Australia. His research areas of interest include freshwater policy and sustainability.

Executive Members

Brendan Sheridan

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

Brendan is a PhD student in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. His research entails examining fictional (film, novel, and theatre) representations of the New Zealand Land Wars and how the historical and fictional representations interact over time. He has a number of other research interests including post-colonial narratives, folklore, fantasy literature and global history. His non-academic interests include rugby, kayaking, reading, films, and is a private tutor/ESOL teacher.

Kemi Mildred Hughes

Faculty of Law

Kemi is currently a PhD student in the Faculty of Law. Her research topic focuses on investigating the influence of the United Nations at the local, regional and global levels in the mitigation and adaptation of climate change. Her other research interest areas focus on gender mainstreaming and climate change as well as the role of women in influencing climate change mitigation and adaptation policies. A keen adventurer, she enjoys interacting with people of various nationalities and learning about various cultures.

Mauricio Kimura

Faculty of Law

Mauricio is a trained Brazilian lawyer, spent the last 20 years in law firms and corporate legal departments, like IBM and CBS. Currently enrolled as 3rd year Ph.D. candidate at Te Piringa Faculty of Law, researching about legal personality for Artificial Intelligent agents. Previously earned his LL.M degree from The George Washington University Law School, in Washington DC and his LL.B from Sao Bernardo do Campo School of Law, Brazil. Hobbies are running, reading and judo. Married and father of 3 little boys. Lived in US, Europe, and Japan. Fluent speaker of Portuguese and Spanish. Born and raised in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Saikrishna Srinivasan

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

Saikrishna is a PhD student in the Screen and Media Studies. He came to New Zealand in 2018, after finishing his masters in Scotland and briefly working in Hollywood movies, as a VFX artist for an year. His research is about examination of the application and assimilation of Virtual Reality in Theatre Performance. His area of research interest include VR, animation, ways of integrating the media technologies to experiment an engaging way of storytelling.

Yasmine Sehran

Faculty of Education

Yasmine is a Master’s student in the Faculty of Education. Her research investigates how cross-cultural relationships occur between infants (under 18 months of age) in early childhood settings. Her study interests include inclusive education, family empowerment, interculturalism, pedagogy, and infant/toddler intercultural dialogue. Outside her studies, Yasmine is an early childhood teacher for infants in a multicultural not-for-profit early childhood centre.