Ignite | Turn Disruption into Opportunity: Adapting in the Age of AI - The University of Auckland

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Turn Disruption into Opportunity: Adapting in the Age of AI

We've brought together some of Aotearoa's brightest minds to discuss how you can stay ahead in an AI-powered world. Tap into practical insights in this free series built for busy professionals like you who are shaping their future.

Meet our inspiring speakers including Sir Ashley Bloomfield.
Multidisciplinary panel discussing Thriving in tomorrow’s workforce - resilience, upskilling and career transition in the age of AI.
Watch videos featuring real-life journeys across business, science, health, engineering, education, law and more.

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Professor Sir Ashley Bloomfield

Professor Sir Ashley Bloomfield

Professor, School of Population Health, University of Auckland.
Chief Executive at Public Health and Forensic Science.

Professor Sir Ashley Bloomfield

Sir Ashley Bloomfield has 25 years’ experience in public health, policy and health leadership, including at the WHO in Geneva. He was New Zealand’s Director-General of Health from June 2018 to July 2022 and led the country’s health response to the COVID-19 pandemic. He was appointed a Knights Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit (KNZM) in the 2023 New Year Honours for services to public health. He is now a Professor at the University of Auckland's School of Population Health and Chief Executive at Public Health and Forensic Science.

Portrait of Dr. Deepika Jindal

Dr. Deepika Jindal

Group Lead for Management, University of Auckland Business School

Portrait of Dr. Deepika Jindal

Dr. Deepika Jindal teaches Human Resource Management and related courses. Deepika also serves as Programme Director for the Master of Business Management programme. Primarily an educator, Deepika maintains an active research interest in job crafting. She is the Branch President of Human Resource New Zealand’s (HRNZ) Academic Branch and a member of its Auckland Branch committee. Additionally, she contributes as a committee member at the Women in Business Chapter of the American Chamber of Commerce in New Zealand. Deepika has been recognised with one University award and three Business School awards in the past years. She received HRNZ’s Academic Impact Award in 2023 and was recently honoured with HRNZ’s 2025 Leadership Award and HR Person of the Year Award. Before entering academia, she spent nearly a decade in the Corporate HR department of a leading Indian manufacturing conglomerate. Deepika is a Chartered Fellow of HRNZ and a Fellow of Advance HE (UK).

Portrait of Dr. Rosie Dobson

Dr. Rosie Dobson

Psychologist and Researcher, University of Auckland. Principal Advisor AI Research and Evaluation, Te Whatu Ora.

Portrait of Dr. Rosie Dobson

Rosie's clinical work as a Health Psychologist highlighted the inequities in access to psychology services and led her to conduct research investigating how digital tools could make health services more accessible. Her research work has focused on the development and evaluation of digital health tools to provide accessible health care and support to people within their daily lives. She has been involved in the co-design, development and trial of digital health tools in a range of areas, including diabetes, maternal and child health, smoking cessation, mental health, and pulmonary rehabilitation. More recently, her research has explored patient and consumer perspectives on the secondary use of their data to inform the development of digital tools including AI and algorithms. She is a member of the National AI and Algorithm Expert Advisory Group for Te Whatu Ora, the establishment lead for the National AI in Health Research Network, and the AI Lead for the Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences at the University of Auckland.

Portrait of Sean Sturm

Dr. Sean Sturm (Ngāti Rakapaaka)

Associate Professor Critical Studies in Education

Portrait of Sean Sturm

Sean joined the School of Critical Studies in Education in the legacy Faculty of Education and Social Work in 2020. They teach in the BA (Education Studies) programme and lead the MEd programme, offered by the Faculty of Arts and Education, as well as leading the Teaching Catalyst programme for academics new to teaching at the University.
Sean serves on the University's Senate, Academic Programmes Committee and Tertiary Education Union Branch Committee; the Faculty of Arts and Education Board of Postgraduate Studies (Subdoctoral); and the Critical Studies in Education Teaching Cultures Committee. Sean is the Co-Editor of Knowledge Cultures (Addleton) and PESA Agora, and serves on the Executive of the Association of Visual Pedagogies as Treasurer.

Portrait of Professor Alexandra Andhov

Professor Alexandra Andhov

Inaugural Chair in Law and Technology and Director of the Center for Advancing Law and Technology Responsibly (ALTeR), University of Auckland Law School and Business and Economics School.

Portrait of Professor Alexandra Andhov

Professor Andhov's research focuses on corporate law, capital market law, and the regulation of emerging technologies such as blockchain and artificial intelligence. She has published extensively in leading European and U.S. law journals and with esteemed publishers like Hart Publishing, Cambridge University Press, and Edward Elgar. Her notable works include Computational Law, which explores the intersection of computational and legal thinking, and the recent anthology Fallacies in Corporate and Financial Law , which interrogates long-standing assumptions and beliefs upon which corporate and financial law have been built that have remained unexamined for decades. As she steps into her new leadership role at the University of Auckland, Professor Andhov aims to build on the university’s legacy of excellence, fostering cross-disciplinary collaborations among faculties and industries. She hopes to support a new generation of legal and business professionals while further integrating innovation and technology into the study and practice of law and business.

Portrait of Professor Deidre Brown

Professor Deidre Brown (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Kahu)

Professor of Architecture, Te Tumu of the Faculty of Engineering and Design Te Herenga Auaha, Codirector University of Auckland MĀPIHI: Māori and Pacific Housing Research Centre.

Portrait of Professor Deidre Brown

Professor Deidre Brown teaches and undertakes research on Māori art and architecture, with a focus on the adoption of new technologies. This is a theme explored in several books, including her coauthored Toi Te Mana: an Indigenous history of Māori Art (2024, which received a 2025 Ockham New Zealand Book Award), the multi-authored Art in Oceania: A new history (2012) and sole-authored Māori Architecture (2009). An early interest in digital technologies is reflected in her curatorship of group exhibitions, such as Hiko (1999, Robert McDougall Art Gallery), TechnoMāori (2001, City Gallery Wellington and Pātaka) and Lightscape (2004, Art and Industry, Christchurch), and a collaborative mixed reality installation with the artist Dr Rachael Rakena (Ngāi Tahu), HIT Lab (University of Canterbury) and Canterbury Museum. Deidre is a fellow of Te Kāhui Whaihanga New Zealand Institute of Architects and the Royal Society of New Zealand Te Apārangi. Her contribution to Māori architecture was recognised with the award of the 2023 Te Kāhui Whaihanga New Zealand Institute of Architects' Gold Medal, the Institute's highest honour.

Portrait of Professor Michael Witbrock

Professor Michael Witbrock

Professor Computer Science, University of Auckland, Science School. Member of the Royal Society of New Zealand (MRSNZ), Executive Council of the AI Forum NZ. Chairperson of the AI for Good Foundation. Science Director for Precision Driven Health.

Portrait of Professor Michael Witbrock

Professor Michael Witbrock leads the Strong AI Lab (SAIL) at the University of Auckland, where his research sits at the intersection of machine learning, reasoning, and natural language understanding. His work focuses on creating AI systems that not only advance scientific knowledge, but also deliver practical benefits for New Zealand entrepreneurs, industry, and society at large. While maintaining a strong interest in knowledge capture and natural language understanding, SAILs current research goals involve the development and use of quasi-logical systems, which retain approximations of the formal properties of logic while adding the learnability and flexibility distributed representations, and have the full representational power of natural languages.
As an adjunct to that work, they work directly on deep learning architectures and on the development and application of large, inferentially productive knowledge bases and inference systems across the resulting range of reasoning paradigms. SAILs aim to apply these representations and reasoners to the construction of practical ""dense domain models"", which are sufficiently complete to support the full range of in-domain reasoning that humans are capable of.