About
The Trimble Technology Lab owes its existance to a dedicated team of people who were instrumental in bringing it to fruition, and making it what it is today. Prominant amongst them is Professor Vicente Gonzalez, who has since moved to Alberta University in Canada, and the team at Trimble who made all this possible. The present team at the University is detailed below.
Dr Mark Jeunette
TTL Champion
Mark Jeunnette is the Director of Engineering Design at the University of Auckland. He brings to the role a varied background bridging industry, academia, and entrepreneurship across four continents and multiple world premiere institutions. Mark’s professional interests and experience range from engineering education at Olin College of Engineering (a US 4-year undergraduate college founded with the express intent to disrupt engineering education) to product development at IDEO (a world renowned innovation consulting firm) and technology in the developing world (at iDE, a US non-profit focused on supporting economically sustainable enterprises in low-income countries). Within his two graduate degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mark combined his interest in instrumentation with product development and technology in the developing world, focusing his theses on humanitarian demining in Cambodia (MS) and remote sensing for small-plot agriculture in India (PhD). His work in agriculture in Ethiopia and India led eventually to the founding of Viridis RS, a startup working to make remote sensing useful and affordable for the 84% of farmers worldwide with small landholdings.
Dr Yang Zou
TTL Academic Lead
Yang’s research lies in the inter-disciplinary area of construction informatics and automation, focused on applying digital technologies and robotics, e.g. Building Information Modelling (BIM), Unmanned Aerial System (UAS), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Extended Reality (VR/AR/MR), Smart Sensing and Visualisation, throughout the lifecycle of complex building and large-scale infrastructure systems. My ultimate research goal is to develop a smarter, safer and better built environment.
Dr Roy C. Davies
TTL Technician
Dr. Roy Davies is a pioneer in Virtual Reality, specialising initially in its application to real world situations such as brain injury rehabilitation and participatory design. He completed his post-graduate studies at Lund University in Sweden, and set up one of the first VR research centres in Europe. He then returned to New Zealand to head Nextspace, a collaboration between the NZ government and software developers Right Hemisphere to catalyse research and new product/application development in the 3D graphics space. A spell at AUT’s Business Innovation Centre followed before he co-founded Imersia, which brings the power of multi-user mixed reality to mobile devices. Imersia has invented a revolutionary and patentable method of distributing digital and immersive gamified content to any location, and has had successes in location-based digital storytelling and marketing. Roy has spent time in both research and business environments, and is uniquely placed to understand the stresses of both and bridge the ‘gap’. He conveys useful research and education into the commercial world and brings complex, practical problems into the research world, as well as providing valuable direction to courses and training programmes.
Cristina Gonzalez Pestana
Alumni Relations and Development
Cristina is the Development Manager for the Faculty of Engineering, a face that has become familiar to donors, supporters, and alumni as she works to increase philanthropic support for the Faculty’s various initiatives and strategic priorities.
She has been involved in philanthropy for the last seven years, supporting a range of causes. Her dream is to enable students and future generations to fulfill their potential.