“The leaves will change their colours… and life / wants more from me.” The emotional lyrics of Kiwi singer-songwriter Kylie Price resonate in an autumnal London, much as they did in her chilly hometown of Dunedin. Kylie, 29, concluded her debut season in the UK last month with a polished set at the renowned music venue ‘Green Note’ in Camden and she is Caffe Nero’s featured ‘Artist of the Month’ for November. With two decades of experience performing and an array of international awards under her belt, the 29-year old is now evolving further, as her London adventure brings a new backbeat to the country-influenced folk-pop style which has brought her NZ chart success. “I’m excited to share with people new music that they wouldn’t expect me to release”, she says.

Rachel Peacock recalls an emotional moment during the grand re-opening of the Battersea Power Station on October 14th, when the marketing team she’s worked with since the project began gathered for a group hug. “One of them just said ‘we did it’,” she says. “I’ll never forget that moment”. She expects to feel similarly emotional when walking through the carved waharoa gateway at Auckland Airport, hearing birdsong and familiar accents, when she returns for Christmas in New Zealand after three long years away.

As Senior Marketing Manager for the Battersea Power Station regeneration project, Rachel’s high-paced working life in the lead-up to its opening celebration hasn’t left much time for moments of reflection. Rachel is responsible for promoting the relaunched Power Station as a destination for shopping and hospitality, combined with new parks, offices and living spaces directly on the riverfront. The striking shape of the former power station is an iconic landmark on the London skyline, and its 42-acre site is effectively a new London neighbourhood, with a vibrant events calendar and dozens of innovative concept stores by leading brands like Zara, Adidas and MAC. 

“I guess most people don’t think about this very beautiful, coordinated cellular response to make antibodies…” Michelle Linterman’s passion for her subject is immediately obvious. Born and bred on the Kapiti Coast, Michelle is a globally-renowned immunologist at the Babraham Institute, a site for biomedical research centred around an old red-brick manor house in a rolling natural landscape just outside Cambridge. This picturesque English setting provides the research group she established ten years ago with cutting-edge laboratory facilities for testing responses to new vaccines. Early in the pandemic, Michelle’s ten-person team at the Babraham ran an important preclinical study of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine in aged mice, in order to test - faster than could be tested in ageing humans - how that vaccine would act in older bodies. 

The Linterman Group’s wider research programme centres on the “nuts and bolts” of how the immune system mounts a good response against vaccination, and why vaccines don’t always work as well for certain age groups. Michelle’s team tests the detailed cellular and molecular functioning of vaccines against a range of human diseases, such as malaria and influenza.