Learn more about Shaun's pathway to becoming a scientist working with natural hazards and risks.
Video transcript
[Video shows an aerial view of Riccarton]
I remember talking to my friends at the time, you know how kids are, and they always ask each other:
‘Oh what do you wanna be when you grow up?’
And in my case, you know, I had some of my best friends were wanting to become doctors, lawyers, or pilots, and astronauts.
[Video shows Shaun sitting in an office and speaking]
I think I I kept myself a little bit more to the ground, and I wanted to be a rock scientist because at the time, I wasn't sure what a geologist was called at the time.
[Music plays]
Talofa, kia orana, fakaalofa atu. My name is Shaun Williams. I'm originally from Samoa.
And I moved over to Otautahi Christchurch in 2007 where I came to study graduate school, my master's and PhD, and I've been here ever since.
I joined NIWA in 2015. And I think I've always had a fascination of, with natural hazards, per se. Back in 1990, 91 I would have been about 8 years old then, Samoa had experienced some of the worst disasters, tropical cyclone disasters, that it had seen in quite some time.
At least in my lifetime at the time, I was I was just a kid then.
But the scale of the impacts was quite devastating, and the memory of that always was imprinted in me at a very young age.
And so that event, coupled with some of the I suppose folks that I was exposed to at the time, a good friend of my father's, my parents I should say, was also a geologist who was always talking about rock formations, this is how volcanoes formed, and this is how Samoa was formed five million years ago.
I always had a fascination about those sorts of things. And so I suppose that that to a large degree influenced the pathway that I later took.
[Video shows Shaun working outdoors]
The quality that I find and perhaps most, if not all, Pacific Island peoples regardless of where they're from, is that sense of mutual respect.
And to some degree, well, to a large degree, sorry, also that sense of that communal thinking, you know, which is which I think is quite fundamental in this line of work, you know, when you're talking about disaster resilience, climate change.
It's all about developing undertaking the mahi for others rather than yourself.
And I do find that a lot of Pacific peoples bring with them those traits you know, that sense of family, that sense of community, that sense of duty almost to your people or to your community.
[Video shows Shaun sitting in an office and speaking]
I would certainly encourage anyone who's interested to undertake the pathway. And there's multiple different ways, multiple different routes, you know.
An analogy I learned from a professor up in Waikato University is the braided river analogy. And if, you know, if we think about greater rivers, it's not just one ideal stream or river course where you know, there's multiple little, almost like almost like a braid, hair braiding, you know, feeding.
There's multiple different pathways you can take, which are all leading in the same direction.
[Music plays]
I took of course, the standard subjects of your sciences, so with, you know, your maths, your physics, your chemistry, I didn't take biology, I took geography instead because I was much more interested in geographical distributions.
And then in later years, once and I suppose tertiary level, I focused on geology and the earth sciences and a lot of the modeling, from a modeling side of things, maths is quite important. ,
And of course, we can't understate the importance of computer science, especially in this day and age where some of the fundamental, in fact, some of the most important tools we use, are computer resources and computing resources.
But, yeah, really depends on what aspect of this broad disaster field, climate change field you're interested in.
[Video shows Shaun standing outside]
Talofa, kia orana, fakaalofa atu My name is Shaun Williams. I am from villages of Salelolonga and Tafua in Samoa, [unkown] and [unknown] in the northern Cook Islands, and Mutalau in Niue.
And I live in Otautahi, Christchurch.
I went to school at Samoa College and Robert Louis Stevenson School in Samoa.
I am from Apia, Samoa. I am a son, a brother, a father, and a scientist.
And this is how I became a natural hazards and risk scientist at the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, NIWA, in New Zealand.
[Music plays]