Sophia Hardie Otago HRNZ Double Win 2026 | AcademicJobs
University of Otago's Sophia Hardie wins HR Student and Person of the Year at HRNZ 2026, highlighting excellence in New Zealand higher education HRM.
Always respectful and encouraging to all.
Associate Professor Lynnaire Sheridan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Management at the Otago Business School, University of Otago. She concurrently holds the role of Associate Dean – Academic (part-time), leading teaching and learning activities with a focus on undergraduate programmes, overseeing regulations for papers and degrees, serving on academic boards at the Business School and University levels, and contributing to student-facing services. Her academic background includes a Bachelor of Applied Science with Honours, a Graduate Certificate in Tertiary Teaching, and a PhD. Lynnaire's research emphasises identifying key insights and potential learnings from complex scenarios to facilitate problem-solving and promote positive socio-cultural, ecological, and economic outcomes. She has applied this lens to organisational challenges in workplace health and safety, tourism, health, global migration, and higher education domains such as work-integrated learning, academic integrity, and equity. Core research interests comprise the future of work enabling workplace diversity, workplace health and safety management, integration of indigenous knowledges into management education, scholarship of teaching and learning practices, and practice theory.
Sheridan teaches MANT 346 Employment Relations and MANT 330 Leadership and Change, and supervises doctoral students on topics including shared leadership, delegation, resilience in leadership, work-ready graduate requirements, and sustainable development goals. She is recognised as a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy UK and a Chartered Member (Academic) of Human Resources New Zealand. Notable publications include co-editing Artificial Intelligence and Academic Integrity: Navigating Ethical Challenges of AI in Education (Springer Nature, 2026), chapters on evaluating AI-enhanced communication for student belonging and engagement (2026) and AI's crossroads with academic integrity (2026), and a chapter on SDGs and HRM in Australia and New Zealand in The Elgar Companion to Human Resource Management Beyond the Sustainable Development Goals (2025). Highly cited earlier works feature a flexible framework for evaluating socio-cultural impacts of small festivals (2005, 340 citations), wine tourism in the Canary Islands (2009, 174 citations), and factors and key interactions influencing successful employment outcomes for people with disabilities (2024, 25 citations). She delivered an invited presentation on NZ employment relations and workplace health and safety updates at the ACU Peter Faber Business School Research Symposium (2025).
University of Otago's Sophia Hardie wins HR Student and Person of the Year at HRNZ 2026, highlighting excellence in New Zealand higher education HRM.
