Lightning Talks

The webinar will consist of 5 presenters who will share their knowledge and experience in the transportation industry and take part in a open Q&A panel session at the end.

Presentation: Equity in Transportation through systematic safety
Presented by Ellie Craft
Ellie will describe the ideas behind systematic safety in the Netherlands and how if we think of mobility (by any transport mode) as a human right we get quite different out comes then traditional findings
Ellie studied Civil Engineering at Auckland University as a response to loving science subjects at school. Ellie is passionate about solving climate change issues and lucked out when she found a transport engineering at specialist sustainable transport consultant (MRCagney).
What Ellie loves about her job is “that working on urban transport issues is as much to do with engineering problem solving as it is to do with human behaviour”.

Presentation: How free pizza led me into a career in Transportation.
Presented by Madi Salter
Madi will talk about her unconventional route into the Transportation field, which started with free pizza. From here, the opportunities have been endless, despite the surprises that have popped up.
Madi graduated from The University of Auckland in 2018 with a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) in Geography. After a brief stint at Disney World in Florida, Madi begun her career in Transportation in January of 2019 as a transportation graduate at Harrison Grierson in their Parnell office. Madi has worked on many Transportation Impact Assessments, Integrated Transportation Assessments, Peer Reviews and Road Safety Audits. Madi is particularly interested in contributing to a more equitable transport system in Aotearoa, New Zealand.

Presentation title: Saving lives one road at a time.
Presented by Haris Zia
Haris will talk about his rewarding experience working with transport authorities to improve road safety and the many challenges that come along the way.
Haris is a Principal Transportation Engineer at Abley, specialising in road safety. He graduated from the University of Queensland in 2012 with a Bachelor of Engineering (Civil) before moving to New Zealand in 2014. After brief stints in road construction and structural engineering, Haris found his true calling in transportation consulting and then road safety. Recently, he has been working with Councils all over New Zealand with implementing targeted road safety treatments, often needing to balance the community and political views with achieving the best engineering outcome. Haris is passionate about his work and the direct impact it has on saving lives on our road network.

Presenter: Matt Ensor, Director in transport advisory, Beca.
Matt’s tertiary qualifications are in civil engineering & social science and in 2011 he won a Prime Minister’s Business Scholarship to study leadership and strategy at the INSEAD Business School in France.  Matt’s worked on a range of transport projects over 25 years and also spent 4 years working at the NZ Ministry of Defence on major military equipment programmes.  During his time with Beca since 2002, Matt has focused on transport technology, smart cities, and the future of mobility.  Since 2020, Matt is leading Beca’s Artificial Intelligence (NLP) business.

Presenter: Blair Monk, CPEng, IntPE, ITSNZ Board Member
Blair has accumulated wide-ranging experience over the last 25 years from client and consultancy perspectives whilst being passionate about ITS/AV/EV/MaaS technologies.
His current role is Technical Director for Transport Network Optimisation for Aurecon.  Blair works with a large team of engineers and analysts in diverse fields such as future technologies, traffic control centre operations, traffic signal design and coordination, ramp metering, incident management, driver information systems, ITS asset management along with road, bridge and tunnel operations.
Blair has attended many ITS world congresses, with the latest being in Melbourne 2016, Montreal in 2017 and Copenhagen in 2018 and Singapore in 2019.
As part of Aurecon’s Design Academy, Blair bridges the gap between End User desires, Transport Planning and future Technology Operations of the transport network.
Blair is also proud to be part of the ITS NZ Board.  He is keen to help build the future transport network investigating Micro Mobility and the Post Covid-19 changes to society.