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Thursday 15th May 2025
Former student awarded top scholarship.
Congratulations Joseph Balfe on your outstanding achievement.
Congratulations to our former student Joseph Balfe, who has been awarded the prestigious Clarendon Scholarship to undertake his PhD in Psychiatry at the University of Oxford, England.
Joseph was a student at Waitaki Boys' between 2012 to 2016 and besides being a Prefect and outstanding student, was well known for being a talented musician, speaker and sports person.
To put his accomplishment in to perspective, there are about 38,000 graduate applications per year, Joseph is just one of 200 from across the world selected for the fully-funded scholarship.
Joseph graduated from Otago in 2024 with a Master of Science (with Distinction) in Neuroscience and more recently, has been working full-time as a Clinical Trials Associate at Pacific Edge Cancer Diagnostics in the Center for Innovation and is also a part-time research assistant at Otago. He has been working on developing a novel wearable smart-device to detect and relieve asthma attacks by harnessing the interconnectivity of the nervous system.
Joseph will be joining Oxford’s Translational Neurostimulation Laboratory, where he will be investigating a novel form of brain stimulation for the treatment of depression. Joseph’s concern for mental health sparked his initial curiosity for neuroscience.