Our Mentors

Dr Nicolas Pontes

Experiential learning is an important part of students’ professional development in business schools. However, these learning opportunities usually take the form of class projects, internships, regional or national competitions but rarely do business students have access to opportunities that replicate a real professional environment. 

With this in mind, Dr Nicolas Pontes, Lecturer in Marketing at the University of Queensland, created Newish Communications, a student-run communications agency, with a vision to revolutionize the business learning environment. Dr Pontes understood first-hand that university students possess an unparalleled motivation, passion and willingness to learn yet lacked practical hands-on experience in the advertising and marketing realm.  Dr Pontes has an active role at Newish by mentoring students, providing training and workshops and acting as the chair of the Advisory Board.

Sharon Twomey

With over two decades of experience leading teams in the highly demanding and dynamic advertising industry in Australia and the UK, Sharon possesses a wealth of knowledge and expertise.

Sharon’s passion for helping people feel healthy and find balance, comes through in her confident leadership style. Her ability to nurture her team’s strengths, fostering a cohesive and supportive environment is one of the many factors that has contributed to her success in building high-performance teams.

Sharon’s Superpowers include; macro thinking, conscious selling, cultivating cohesive relationships, maintaining a solutions-focused mindset, and adopting a pragmatic approach. These qualities have contributed to her success in the ever-changing landscape of the advertising world.

Beyond her career, Sharon is a fervent advocate for health and wellness. She has embarked on a mission to inspire individuals to embrace healthy lifestyle choices. In pursuit of this goal, Sharon has established her own business, ‘Get Rooted in Health’ offering a range of products and insights that harness the power of food to promote natural healing.

Sarah Pelecanos

Science and art are the two complimentary (and often competing) elements within digital marketing. With proper investigation and dissection of both you are opening your mind to a more logical and structured approach to digital marketing. In this current landscape, you need to be able to prove your value.

Sarah Pelecanos, Founder and Managing Director of TwentyTwo Digital started her business with the above in mind, creating an agency that serves both art and science. Intuition and creativity are not only encouraged, they are also backed by facts and data.

Each fortnight Sarah meets with the PR & Social Team at Newish Communications to cover industry news, practical improvements towards digital performance and methods on how to present yourself to the market after graduation.

Jessamy Ross

Jessamy is a senior copywriter at VMLY&R. Over the past 8 years, she’s earned her creative stripes working on campaigns big and small for a range of Australia’s most interesting clients (and others she’s made interesting along the way). As a past Award School winner (2014) big, bold ideas get her out of bed in the morning. But, as a Masters-degree-qualified nerd, she also thrives on finding her way out of a strategic quagmire. Her writing has been published in The Age, Sydney Morning Herald and Wellbeing Magazine.

She’s worked on creative for Woolworths, Nestle, Taco Bell, Queensland Health, Queensland Fire & Emergency Serives, QSuper & more.

Edwina Gilmour

Edwina is the Managing Director at Rumble. Edwina’s career has span over 20 years with experience in both the advertising and marketing industries. This has provided her with a wealth of industry experience, providing key insights into the tourism, retail, media, finance, education, government and not-for-profit industries. She has the ability to bring fresh thinking, an energetic drive and the competency to deliver.

Bec McCall

Bec is a Creative Director at Rumble. “Bec has been producing internationally awarded work across a diverse range of clients for over 10 years. She is a strong believer in developing strategically-led solutions that are not only creative, but also effective. Bec enjoys a challenge and believes that nothing should get in the way of a good idea, which has seen her develop a broad skillset beyond her craft as an art director.”

Rhys Venning

Rhys is a Creative Director at Rumble. “Rhys is an internationally awarded writer with over 10 years’ industry experience. During his time, he has helped steer many highly-successful campaigns for clients in almost every sector – from big, integrated projects to cutting-edge tech ideas. Being a words guy, he believes in the power of a good pun, but more importantly, that creativity breeds effectiveness.”

Ashton Tuckerman

Ashton is a seasoned marketing professional with a passion for building brands through powerful storytelling. Ashton has more than a decade of industry experience, having worked for global game changers (Flight Centre), industry disruptors (Youfoodz), and award-winning agencies (Havas). Most recently, Ashton was the CMO and Australia GM of the private chef start-up Gathar, taking the brand global with the support of Chef Curtis Stone. Having hung up her Gathar apron, Ashton’s plate is currently full studying her MBA at UQ, with side servings of brand consulting and mentoring the next generation of marketers.

Sam Willmer

Sam is a trained marketer, media agency account lead and team manager with over 15 years experience encompassing a wide range of disciplines including planning, investment, digital, strategy and account service.  Beginning his career at Media Merchants as a media assistant & coordinator, he grew his experience & talent in line with exponential agency growth. This led to a Group Account Manager role overseeing the client service, planning and management of an investment team across a predominantly retail client portfolio. In addition to this role, he leads the growth of digital planning, Investment & best practice across the agency, from the ground up. In 2015 he joined UM as a Communications Manager to focus on growing my breadth of skill & experience on a new suite of top tier clients. Since joining UM he have progressed into a Client Director role responsible for driving the delivery of class-leading product & business outcomes. Within this role, he manages the professional development and workflow of three direct reports and the coordination of product specialists across the broader business.

Monique Baillie

Monique Baillie is Group Client Director at MediaCom.

Claire Holmes

As a self confessed “corporate nerd”, Claire has worked across a variety of corporate clients in both agency and in-house roles. She hit the ground running in an agency role while completing her degree and consulted to dozens of companies across the financial, superannuation, property, marine, aviation and energy sectors. Never one to shy from a challenge, she orchestrated a merger between two mutual banks while juggling multiple clients and interning in Federal Parliament. While working for RACQ in a Corporate Affairs role, Claire got a chance to explore her love for mentoring the UQ HASS Young Alumni Mentoring Program. Through this program, Claire connected with Newish and knew she wanted to help this crack team of marketing and communication experts make an impact in their industry. Now back in agency, Claire is the Account Director for a global client and is responsible for implementing integrated campaigns across North America, United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia.