Hancine describes her superpower as sense-making, the ability to take complex, contested ideas and distil them into something human beings can actually act on. A Programme Lead at academyEX with a Master of Educational Leadership, she guides leaders to embrace discomfort, neurodiversity, and inclusive thinking as foundations of real resilience. Her work with Nga Pumanawa e Waru and postgraduate programmes is grounded in lived experience: she built her academic portfolio after a late diagnosis of dyslexia, and she brings that hard-won perspective into every room

Maggie has spent 30 years living inside the questions most people are only just starting to ask about technology, community, and change. With a transdisciplinary PhD from AUT Colab and experience spanning ecovillages in West Africa, Indigenous organisations in Aotearoa, and creative communities across four continents, her practice sits where AI meets culture, place, and the human need to make sense of the world. Through Strange Intelligences Lab she runs AI literacy programmes built for communities and creatives, the people the mainstream tech conversation leaves behind.

Allanah has spent 20 years helping organisations and leaders navigate the messy reality of change, not the theory of it. With a PhD in Business Administration and deep expertise in organisational resilience, inclusive leadership, and psychological safety, she brings an evidence-informed, practice-led approach that holds up in the real world. As an Industry Advisor at academyEX, she helps postgraduate learners translate theory into confident, ethical leadership practice, the kind that works when things get genuinely hard.

Teah works at the intersection of research, art, and Indigenous knowledge, catching and telling the stories that conventional science doesn't know how to hold. A kaupapa Maori researcher and evaluator at Massey University's SHORE & Whariki Centre, she chairs the National Kaitiaki Group ensuring Maori women's health data is used in ways that genuinely benefit Maori communities. Her HRC-funded programme is pioneering Wairua methodologies for climate adaptation with rangatahi Maori, asking the kinds of research questions that most institutions haven't yet learned to ask.