Summer Gold Competition 2019 winners

View the posters and videos submitted by our Summer Gold winners from 2019.

If you’ve ever made up a song about what you’re doing or hummed while waiting in a queue—you’ve demonstrated a behavior explored in the winning video entry for Victoria University of Wellington’s annual Summer Gold Competition.

Psychology and Theatre student Pauline Ward’s research project investigates how singing is used in our day-to-day lives and as a conversational tool, and won her Best Overall Video and $1,000 in prize money.

The judges praised Pauline’s use of simple, vibrant animations and narrative in her video to present the research in an accessible and relevant way. Her work was supervised by Professor Ann Weatherall from the School of Psychology.

The Best Overall Poster category and $1,000 prize was won by Architecture student Isabella Lum. Her winning poster analysed how density is defined and measured in New Zealand, as the country’s housing landscape shifts to one with denser and more diverse housing.

The judges commended Isabella’s portrayal of a difficult topic to non-specialists and her well thought-out research, which was supervised by Professor Brenda Vale, Daniele Abreu e Lima, and Nilesh Bakshi from the School of Architecture, and Nick Barratt-Boyes from Studio Pacific Architecture.

The Summer Gold Competition aims to acknowledge the research achievements of the students who participated in the recent Summer Research scholarship programme by inviting them to design a poster or create a video about their research in collaboration with their supervisor.

Best Overall Poster

Isaballa Lum with the poster Quantifying New Zealand’s urban density.

Best Overall Video

Pauline Ward with the video Singing in conversation.

Highly commended:

Lucy Jaegers and Florence Hillyer-Brandt with the video Headlice!
Theo Calkin with the video Geotrips.

Most engaging demonstration of research

Timothy Gastrell with the poster Teaching machines to recognise emotions.

Best Visual Presentation

Celia Hall with the poster Rākau Rongoā Garden.

Architecture and Design winners

Chiara Shim with the poster Remote Residential.
Tessa Lynch with the poster The design of acute mental health wards.

Highly commended:

MacKenzie van Fulpen with the poster Influences on people’s decisions around emerging health technologies.

Humanities and Social Sciences winner

Sophia McKellar with the poster The building of Māori community connections to places through environmental activism.

Highly commended:

Ellen Tapsell with the poster Te Whakamaru o Horohoro Maunga.
Millie Godfrey with the poster The Pulter Project.

Science, Engineering, and Health winner

Amy Wilson and Hamish Clark with the poster Public Transport Reliability.

Highly commended:

Jordan Willis-Love with the poster A century of cancer awareness health promotion.

Science winner

Amy Gault with the poster The vulnerability of Aotearoa to introduced mosquito species.

Highly commended:

Justin Liu with the poster Digitising Te Papa.

Victoria Business School winner

Alana Harrison with the poster Evaluating consumer responses towards the health star rating system.