Women2Watch awards 2019 The W2W Awards recognise and celebrate the achievements of Old Girls under the age of 36. The 2019 winners, Sheryl Tan (2006) and Emily Adlam (2008), were honoured at a School assembly in June.
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DIO TODAY
Sheryl Tan A neuroscientist, Sheryl is a research associate at the Spinal Cord Injury Research Facility at the University of Auckland. She attended Dio for her last three years of school and is grateful to her parents for supporting her education. Science, in particular biology, was her passion at school. Sheryl was an active member of the Academic Council for science and in her final year represented New Zealand at the Bio Futures Forum in Brisbane with financial assistance from the Heritage Foundation. Sheryl credits her biology teacher, Dr Jacquie Bay, for encouraging her to choose a career in science. Sheryl says she was painfully shy, but despite tears on her first day, she persevered. “I left Dio a little more confident, with
Emily with her parents Professor Tom Barnes and Mrs Julia Barnes after her Cambridge graduation last year with a PhD in Theoretical Physics.
a passion for all things science and resolute in having a career that would benefit others,” she says. Sheryl went on to earn a Bachelor of Science (1st Class Honours) Biomedical Science from the University of Auckland. In 2015 she received a PhD in Biomedical Science and her thesis was on the Dean’s Honours List. She was offered two doctoral scholarships and accepted the Brian de Luen Doctoral Scholarship from the Auckland Medical Research Foundation. Sheryl’s doctoral thesis ‘Towards understanding the structure and plasticity of the human olfactory bulb in the normal and Parkinson’s disease brain’ was ranked among the top 10 percent of doctoral theses for 2015.
