Remembering David Penny

‍David Penny passed away on the 20th of last month. The celebration of his life will be on the 27th of July at Massey University in Palmerston North where many stories will be told, and fond memories shared.

When I was working on the business case for the Advanced Genomics Research Platform call for proposals in 2016, I sent a copy of it to David and asked to meet with him. By then, he was mostly retired, but he kindly took the time to meet with this relative newcomer in NZ science. When we met, he asked all the pertinent questions about what we were proposing, why, what were we hoping to achieve, etc. Ultimately, he simply asked, "What do I need to do?" His support of our ideas for a better way of doing publicly funded genomics research in Aotearoa means as much to me now as it did then.