From the Chair

This is an exciting time for REANNZ with a fresh Board, new Chief Executive, a cohesive membership, and new strategic objectives for the year ahead.

We are delighted to welcome the new Chief Executive of REANNZ, Dianna Taylor, who took up the role earlier this month. Dianna is a highly capable leader and brings strong strategic and stakeholder engagement skills and experience within a technical environment. We look forward to working with her as she leads REANNZ through this next stage of its development, to support our members and to meet the needs of New Zealand’s research, education and innovation community.

We are also very pleased that an agreement has been reached with the university sector which sees all eight universities again being members of REANNZ. We warmly welcome the return of Lincoln University, the University of Canterbury, and Victoria University of Wellington to our membership.

I would like to also acknowledge the CRI sector and Callaghan Innovation, who have moved to a joint sector Member Services Agreement, similar to the university sector.

Our thanks go to Universities NZ, Science NZ and all those within universities and CRIs who have contributed to the development and finalisation of this agreement.

Finally, REANNZ’s Statement of Performance Expectations for 2019/20 has been agreed and is available on our website. Our strategic objectives for the year are to regain trust and confidence in the value that REANNZ provides to the community through the implementation of the community collaborative framework; enable connectivity to benefit New Zealand through the promotion and growth of network use; and to improve REANNZ’s future sustainability by increasing use and scalability of the network by the research and innovation sectors. Our strategic objectives and priorities are summarised on page 5 of the document.

We look forward to working with you over the next year as we action this work and achieve our vision: to seamlessly enable New Zealand researchers to connect, collaborate and to contribute to world-leading research, within New Zealand and across the globe.

Janine Smith MNZM

REANNZ Chair