Ayush Sharma was a 2023 summer intern at the O’Neill Institute.
Prior to joining O’Neill, Sharma was an intern at the Australian Disputes Centre, where he researched New Zealand’s alternative dispute resolution (ADR) landscape and contributed to a research paper looking into ADR best practices in environmental disputes within Africa and Latin America. In the 2021/22 summer, he was a business consulting intern in EY’s healthcare consulting team. Here, he advised the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet on New Zealand’s recent health system reform. This included contributing to New Zealand’s most comprehensive research on the data and digital capability of the existing health system. In mid-2021, Sharma also worked as a law clerk at the Office of Human Rights Proceedings. Here, he supported the director of proceedings across various legal issues, including unlawful discrimination claims, domestic and international health data privacy, and interest claims on damages in the Human Rights Review Tribunal.
Sharma is currently a graduate teaching assistant at the University of Auckland School of Population Health (tutoring core first and second-year epidemiology and health research courses) and the Faculty of Law (tutoring criminal law). He is also co-chair of the Youth Advisory Group at ProCare Health Ltd, the largest cooperative network of healthcare professionals in New Zealand, supporting around 850,000 people.
He is in his final semester of a Bachelor of Health Sciences and Laws (Honors) conjoint degree at the University of Auckland. During his time at university, Sharma has been heavily involved in the student competitions space. Notable achievements include being a semi-finalist in the Deloitte First-Years Case Competition (2017) and PwC Healthcare Case Competition (2021), second place in the Burgerfuel Brand Challenge (2021), DLA Piper Law & Technology Moot (2022), and LexisNexis Paper Presentation Competition (2023), and winner of the ADC-ICC Asia-Pacific Commercial Mediation Competition (2022).