Engineering Director
John graduated with a master’s degree in Engineering, specializing in mechanical design and automation in assembly. For the first 12 years of his career, John worked in large R&D teams.
Whilst working for Schneider Toshiba inverter in Napier, a call to arms from Al introduced John to the notion of engineering solutions for conservation.
A bit of beer drinking and lots of thinking lead to the development of the Egg Timer transmitter for kiwi and the creation of Wildtech in 2005. One thing lead to another and over the years transmitters were developed that monitored not only activity but light levels and mating interactions for species like weka, kea, kaka, kakapo, possums, takahe, taiko and kiwi. During this time an aerial monitoring system called Sky Ranger was developed to save the knees of conservation workers and further improve productivity.
Recently John’s focus has been on automatically reporting the status of traps and detection networks. But there is more to life, namely falling off a mountain bike trying to keep up with the kids.