Our history

Earthquake hazard studies in the early 1990s highlighted the significant risk to our home city of Christchurch from regional faults including the New Zealand Alpine Fault. Dr Hamish Avery and Peter Coursey in University of Canterbury's Department of Civil and Natural Resources Engineering, developed strong motion seismographs for a Canterbury seismic network that would help understand regional seismicity and this risk. That network was called CanNet. Their research was supported by the Earthquake Commission, Technology NZ, The Mason Trust, the Christchurch City Council, Environment Canterbury and the University of Canterbury.

In 2003 former university academic Dr John Berrill and Dr Avery formed Canterbury Seismic Instruments Ltd to provide these instruments commercially to Geonet, New Zealand's new national strong motion seismic network. We used our strong research base to develop the original CUSP monitoring systems with exceptional flexibility and capacity, using high-precision satellite positioning and timing, for almost any seismic, structural, geotechnical, geological or environmental situation. Half-way through our second decade, the CUSP family evolved to today's EQ Reponders, and we created the Sentinel Earthquake Resilience and Response service to expand the tools CSI offers New Zealand to tackle our unique seismic challange. Two decades since starting, CSI is now New Zealand's leading supplier of structural and seismic monitoring solutions, and our instruments and systems are installed worldwide in buildings, dams, bridges, tunnels, landslides, infrastructure and seismic networks from Asia to Europe and from South America to Scandinavia and Iceland. We are both an instrument and software manufacturer, and service provider.

 

Our team

Chief Executive:

paul photoPaul Drummond is responsible for the operational managment and expansion of all internal CSI operations to support growth.  Paul has spent many years in the fields of new technology development, technology commercialisation, international technology transfer and international business development. Read more about Paul in his LinkedIn profile at https://www.linkedin.com/in/drummondpaul/.


 

 Production, Supply Chain, and Operations:

Shannon Baldwin is an integral part of our ongoing capability. Responsible for our entire supply chain right through to final delivery to our customers, Shannon brings a wealth of practical production managment skills and a fantastic process and delivery focus.  Prior to joining CSI, Shannon was an Electronic Design Engineer at Raztec (NZ) Ltd for six years, where he developed high accuracy current sensing solutions for companies such as Dynamic Controls, Wrightspeed and Tesla. Shannon has a BE(Hons) in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the University of Canterbury. He has a strong background in power electronic design and is very passionate about electric vehicles.

Engineering:

 Daniel Rammelt brings years of fullstack engineering experience to our team. Since starting in late 2020, Daniel has been busy implementing the newly imagined Sentinel services infrastructure, building on our first iteration of this. He has produced a new implementation that brings our server infrastructure and customer facing API and Apps to "top of class" modern standards, while weaving in stringent best-practise engineering design methods and an engaging UX experience.

Timothy Bullen comes to CSI with embedded engineering experience from a global appliances powerhouse and household name in New Zealand. Tim has taken the CSI workhorse platform EQ Responder and modernised this platform to truely deliver on it's full capability, and allow CSI to realise a world class structure characterisation and earthquake response portfolio.

Together, Daniel and Timothy are ensuring CSIs equipment and services bring together the best mix of market need, sound engineering practises, and enabling technologies.  

Advisor to the board:

Len photo

 

Len Damiano is the former General Manager of CSI. Having managed all business, operational and sales functions of the business for seven years, Len now operates as an advisor to the board and on day-to-day business operations.


 

Directors:

David Stock chairman small

David Stock (Chair) is a commercial lawyer practicing in Christchurch. He is a former partner in national law firms Brookman Stock, Buddle Findlay and Chapman Tripp. He is an experienced professional director and been a director and chairman of several publicly listed companies, state-owned enterprises and local government trading entities.

  

photo DonDr Don Elder has 30 years’ experience around the world in engineering, technology development, project development and management, business leadership and management, and governance.  In 1988 - 90 Don led a major study of the Earthquake Hazard in Christchurch, NZ, which was previously thought to have only moderate earthquake risk. The report predicted, with remarkable accuracy, the severity and most of the effects observed and measured using CSI instruments during the 2010-11 Canterbury earthquakes.

 

photo bruceBruce Rickard is experienced in business management and administration. He is a former trade commissioner for New Zealand Trade & Enterprise and is the co-owner of a electronics company specialising in voice-recognition technology.



 

photo hamish 2Dr Hamish Avery was responsible for all technical development, delivery and performance activities. He led the highly innovative development of CSI’s technology platform, instruments and systems from 2003 to 2021, enabling its current world-leading position with major technology advantages, user benefits and lower costs compared to other systems.