Dr Matire Harwood. Photo: Supplied
Last week, Matire Harwood became a professor at Waipapa Taumata Rau, Auckland University's School of Medicine.
Harwood continues to combine academia with her mahi as a GP and said she can't do one without the other.
"Working in primary care is incredibly grounding and you get to see what is happening in people's lives... outside of what can be considered a bit of an ivory tower - academia. So I need to be at [the clinic] at least once a week just to be grounded."
When she was a young girl, her grandfather told her she would become a doctor. Eventually, she earned a Bachelor's in Medicine, became a GP and earned her PhD in 2011.
"The story is that we were visiting whānau in hospital and apparently I looked very curious about what was going on, but also noticed that there were Māori in the beds but there weren't many Māori in the staff," she said.
Her grandfather noticed this and told her she would become a doctor. Dr Harwood said they didn't have any medical doctors in the whānau at the time, but her whole whānau got behind her, with some of her aunties promising her a trip to Disneyland if she completed her studies.
"I'm still waiting on that trip," she said.
Harwood said another important influence was a chemistry teacher at her male-dominated High School in Australia who "smashed" into the students and was rated the top chemistry teacher in Victoria.
"All our maths and science teachers were all men and at that time, I'll be honest, incredibly sexist, and so no female student had completed physics at the highest level at that High School."
Harwood said she always loved science and excelled in chemistry, thanks in part to her stiletto-wearing, hot rod-driving chemistry teacher.
"She inspired me that girls can do it, I guess. She was pre-Spice Girls."
Her whānau moved to Australia in 1977, but Harwood said she always knew she wanted to come home to Aotearoa.
"My heart was always back here," she said.
She returned to Aotearoa to continue her studies to become a doctor.
She wasn't put off by the dominant narrative at the time that Māori women can't do it. Unfortunately, some of her students have told her that they are still experiencing some of those same attitudes, she said.
"I do feel, though, that there is still this idea and you hear this rhetoric all the time that it's a bit easier for Māori and Pacific students to get into medical school, which isn't true. The same standards a set across the board, and our students have to meet them."
Harwood said the system has changed somewhat. When she started out as a junior doctor in the nineties, she was the only Māori doctor working in the entire hospital.
Change has been brought about over the last thirty years by the likes of Colin Mantell, Papaarangi Reid, David Tipene-Leach, Elana Curtis and Rhys Jones, who have worked to build the capacity of Māori and Pacific health workers in the hospital system, she said.
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