Our Stories: Melissa Clark-Reynolds
As the only one at her all-girls school, in 1979 New Zealand, who wanted to do code, Melissa Clark-Reynolds, was bussed to a boys’ school to learn, because of course it was only a class for boys.
Back then there were no computers in schools and each week the class would write their code and send it Wellington, and a week later a note would arrive back to say if the code worked or not.
Fast forward to 2020 and Melissa is now an accomplished futurist – in other words, she looks for patterns that other people can’t see to help predict what may happen in the future.
Things like:
- Amazon buying Whole Foods,
- The economic impact of the pandemic,
- Changing demand on production systems for farmers (e.g. no GMO, Grass fed, carbon positive meat).
“That’s my super power. It’s more about culture anthropology with maths behind it, so a focus on people with an added focus on data.”