Wearing a wetsuit and posing in a rock pool at Brighton Beach, Dr Hickey, who studies new treatments for stroke, coma, diabetes and obesity, has become a poster boy for ADInstruments.
The Dunedin-based company, which produces data acquisition and analysis systems for the life science industry, has developed a global marketing campaign celebrating ''the great minds of science''.
It is being rolled out in key global markets to help the company engage directly with academics and researchers, and will feature at international biomedical and life science conferences and in key journals throughout the year.
ADInstruments has a network of 12 offices and distributors in more than 80 countries.
What it produced was enabling and, in conjunction with Glow Consulting, it got the company's marketing team thinking about ''making the user the hero'', chief marketing officer Julie Curphey said.
They approached the rest of the ADInstruments staff and asked for suggestions of customers who could be science heroes, so they could celebrate the success of the people who used its products and services to research, teach and solve problems.
It was the company's New Zealand-based sales representative who suggested Dr Hickey, a comparative physiologist and multiple Marsden Fund recipient, as a possible ''guinea pig''.
Dr Hickey, who was very receptive to the idea, came south for several days.
Not only did he take part in a photo shoot, but he was also interviewed and talked with the ADInstruments team.
He was enthusiastic and passionate, with a great sense of humour, and it was great for staff to hear what he did.
People such as Dr Hickey were solving some ''really cool, interesting problems'', Ms Curphey said.
ADInstruments was enabling ''great scientists and great science'' by helping them to solve those problems.
Dr Hickey would be ''making his debut in lights'' as part of ADInstrument's research booth at Experimental Biology, an international trade show in Boston, which starts on March 28.
Ms Curphey, who will be at the show, said it would be fascinating to see how people reacted to it, and what customers thought of it.
Feedback internationally had already been very positive.
Staff at ADInstruments had also got behind the campaign and loved the presentation and execution of it and the ''real buy-in'' to telling positive stories about its customers. It was a great result that involved very good teamwork, she said.
Now the company was looking for its next science hero to profile, with a different application of its equipment to solve a different problem.
