Blog

New PhD student Sidney Wong joins the GRI

We are pleased to welcome Sidney Wong as a PhD student within the Geospatial Research Institute.

Sidney is excited to be offered the opportunity through the Geospatial Research Institute Toi Hangarau PhD Scholarship to model the social and linguistic characteristics of local populations using geo-referenced language data. He was attracted by the transdisciplinary nature of this project and he looks forward to exploring the possibilities of geospatial linguistics under the supervision of Dr. Jonathan Dunn and Dr. Ben Adams.

 

He has long been involved with the Linguistics community at UC. He completed a BSc in Linguistics and a Master of Linguistics at UC. He is currently on track to complete a Master of Applied Data Science which he has been studying alongside his role as an Iwi Data Analyst at Stats NZ. In his role, Sidney works with hapū, iwi, and iwi-related groups across Aotearoa to gauge their data needs – this includes consulting, sourcing, extracting, and producing statistics to meet their data requirements.

 

Sidney is an active member of the community in Ōtautahi. He is the co-chair of Qtopia, and is on the board of the Christchurch Heroes Sports Trust and Population Health Advisory Board at Pegasus Health. He also maintains a social media presence for the New Zealand Linguistics Society as their social media officer.

 

Supervisors:

Dr. Jonathan Dunn

Dr. Ben Adams