Dr. Jesse Wood is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Victoria University of Wellington, working with Hiringa te Mahara, the Aotearoa New Zealand pod of Abundant Intelligences — an Indigenous-led, internationally collaborative research program that reimagines AI based on Indigenous Knowledge systems, co-directed by Prof. Jason Edward Lewis (Concordia University) and Prof. Hēmi Whaanga (Massey University). Hiringa te Mahara centres mātauranga Māori and other Indigenous worldviews to reframe artificial intelligence as relational, regenerative, and rooted in place. His postdoctoral research is supervised by Dr. Kevin Shedlock (Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Porou, Te Whakatōhea), a Lecturer in Te Kura Mātai Pūkaha, Pūrorohiko (School of Engineering and Computer Science), whose research focuses on Indigenous knowledge systems and immersive technologies — including virtual and augmented reality, AI for Indigenous tribal decision-making, and tribal data sovereignty.

He holds a BE (Hons.) in Software Engineering and a PhD in Artificial Intelligence, with his doctoral research applying deep learning methods—including Transformers, mixture-of-experts architectures, and contrastive learning—to rapid evaporative ionisation mass spectrometry (REIMS) for seafood authentication.

Jesse's research sits at the intersection of machine learning and analytical chemistry, with a focus on self-supervised learning, Transformer architectures, and rigorous statistical evaluation methods for scientific applications. His current postdoctoral work builds on this foundation, applying deep learning approaches to GC-MS chromatogram analysis for fish species authentication, with an emphasis on conservation-oriented research framed through kaitiakitanga and the protection of marine resources from illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing.

He maintains long-standing collaborations with Bioeconomy Science Institute (formerly Plant & Food Research) and with researchers across VUW's machine learning groups. Jesse is also an elected Postdoc Researchers Representative on the board of the AI Research Association of Aotearoa New Zealand (AIRA).