Congratulations to Associate Professor Siouxsie Wiles who has been appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to microbiology and science communication. Siouxsie has been at the University of Auckland since 2009 where she heads up the Bioluminescent Superbugs Lab. She has received a number of awards during her career, including the inaugural 3Rs prize from the UK’s National Centre for the Replacement, Refinement and Reduction of Animals in Research (NC3Rs) in 2006. In 2011 she was awarded the National Animal Ethics Advisory Committee’s Three Rs prize.
Siouxsie is perhaps better known for her efforts to demystify science for the general public. She is a keen blogger, tweeter, artist, curator, and media commentator, and has won both the Prime Minister’s Prize for Science Media Communication and the Royal Society Te Apārangi’s Callaghan Medal. In 2017 she published her first book, about the growing threat of antibiotic resistant superbugs (‘Antibiotic Resistance: The End of Modern Medicine?’, BWB Texts), and in 2018 she launched a kid’s show about microbiology, on TVNZ’s Heihei platform, co-hosted with her daughter Eve.