Toby Hendy

Hendy attended Katikati College in the Bay of Plenty, New Zealand. In 2011, she was selected by the Royal Society of New Zealand as one of two national delegates to attend the USA International Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama.[2] In 2012, she won first place in the secondary school category of the NZ Eureka Awards for Science Communication.[3]

Hendy obtained a Bachelor of Science, majoring in Physics and Mathematics, at the University of Canterbury. She was awarded an Aurora Astronomy Scholarship that enabled her to take an overseas trip to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Caltech, Carnegie Observatory, UCLA, Macdonald Observatory Texas, University of British Columbia, NRC Observatory Victoria and CHFT Hawaii.[4]

Hendy went on to do her Honours year at the Australian National University in Canberra. In 2017, Hendy started a PhD at ANU focusing on using nanoindentation to examine the mechanical response of plant cells to applied pressure.[5] She was awarded a Westpac Future Leader's Scholarship.[6] During her time as a PhD student she placed runner-up in the Australian national finals of the FameLab science communication competition for her presentation 'Poking Plants'.[7] Her honours thesis title was ‘Examining the mechanical response of Arabidopsis thaliana using nanoindentation and Finite Element Modelling’, where she received class honours with a grade 93/100 for her thesis.[8] In 2018, Hendy discontinued her PhD studies to pursue YouTube full-time.[9]