ErikBlood@xe, aka Colin Hunter

Born Edinburgh, Scotland, 20th December 1968. Educated at The Royal High School, Edinburgh followed by Napier University gaining a BEng (Distinction) Communications and Electronics Engineering. The first 12 years of my working life were with the Sea Mammal Research Unit (SMRU). With SMRU I designed leading (bleeding) edge instruments used to gather information about the behaviour of marine mammals and their environment. I also actively participated in the fieldwork program, traveling all over Scotland and the UK, South Georgia and the Falkland Islands, Svalbard and numerous places in between. In 2002 it became abundantly clear that there was no career path for me in SMRU. In 2003 I took up an offer too good to turn down to move to New Zealand and work for Sirtrack as their R&D Engineer. After nearly 4 years in this position and having built the R&D team from just me to a team of six, I realised that managing the team was not me – not pen-pushing. I moved aside into the position of Product Application Manager which makes far better use of my broad knowledge and skills and will see me work more closely with customers, including fieldwork. Areas of responsibility include steering the development of new technology and how it combines, packaging/production technology, introduction of new technology and, perhaps most importantly, embracing animal factors and ethics – seeing the study subject as the end customer, not the researcher.

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