Prestigious Marsden Fund backs world-class Otago research

4 November 2014

Prestigious Marsden Fund backs world-class Otago research

University of Otago researchers have gained more than $13.9M in new government funding to pursue 22 world-class research projects at the forefront of their disciplines.

Their innovative projects are being supported through the Royal Society of New Zealand-administered Marsden Fund, which is regarded as a hallmark of excellence that allows the country’s best researchers to explore their ideas and showcase them internationally.

Researchers from across the University’s divisions of Health Sciences, Humanities and Sciences will lead the new projects, which include 16 standard projects and six ‘Fast-Start’ projects designed to support outstanding researchers early in their careers.

Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research & Enterprise) Professor Richard Blaikie warmly congratulated Otago’s latest Marsden recipients, who together gained one-quarter of the $55.65M available in this year’s round. In total, 101 contracts were distributed among six universities, two CRIs and three other research institutes.

“I am delighted by these researchers’ success in what is an extremely competitive funding round. Nationally, only 8.3 percent of the 1222 preliminary proposals received were ultimately funded,” says Professor Blaikie.

The Fund’s backing of proposals developed by staff across diverse disciplines at the University reflects the breadth and depth of Otago’s research effort, he says.

The new projects are being led by researchers from the University’s Departments of Anatomy, Anthropology &Archaeology, Applied Sciences, Biochemistry, Botany, Geology, History & Art History, Mathematics & Statistics, Microbiology & Immunology, its National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, Pathology (Christchurch), Physiology, and Zoology.

Professor Blaikie says the researchers’ investigations cover a broad range of topics within the mathematical, physical, environmental, biological, biomedical and social sciences.

One project will focus on unlocking the 80-million-year-old secrets of New Zealand’s flora and fauna by making opaque kauri amber transparent to reveal the fossilised life within.

Several projects involve investigations at the frontiers of neuroscience, including studying impairment-causing changes in brain cell connectivity after strokes, the potential role of the so-called ‘love hormone’ oxytocin in blocking stress hormone release, and delving into the function of a newly identified neuronal circuit involved in the brain’s regulation of fertility.

Another will provide the first comprehensive analysis of the history and use of the coconut as a commodity in the Pacific. The study will explore the impacts of the production and consumption of this versatile natural product upon individual communities and their culture, and economies and environment within the Pacific and beyond.

The six ‘Fast-Starts’ going to Otago early-career researchers include projects that explore native and introduced fish interactions, earthquake fault mechanisms, and how Maori adapted their traditional Pacific dress forms to suit their new home in Aotearoa.

Also included among the fast-starts is a study of the sensing proteins the Kiwifruit pathogen Psa uses to detect specific chemicals in its environment.

Otago’s Marsden recipients

Evolution equations with memory and random fluctuations
Dr Boris Baeumer (Mathematics & Statistics) $565,000
Other Principal Investigator: Dr Mihaly Kovacs (Mathematics & Statistics)

Pushed to the limits: investigating the significance of agricultural transfers and innovation in southern Polynesian colonization
Associate Professor Ian Barber (Anthropology and Archaeology) $720,000

Constant coconuts: a history of a versatile commodity in the Pacific world
Professor Judy Bennett (History and Art History) $710,000

Functional and morphological dissection of a plastic neuroendocrine circuit
Dr Stephen Bunn (Anatomy) $773,000

Functional dissection of a novel GABAergic pathway in the brain circuitry controlling fertility
Dr Rebecca Campbell (Physiology, Centre for Neuroendocrinology) $820,000

Memory impairments after stroke, a stressful condition
Dr Andrew Clarkson (Anatomy) $773,000

Mapping neuroplasticity in the brain
Associate Professor Ruth Empson (Physiology) $820,000

Primed for action: bacterial adaptive immunity
Dr Peter Fineran (Microbiology & Immunology) $773,000

Borrowing from nature’s library: fundamental insights into molecular recognition by chemoreceptors
Dr Monica Gerth (Biochemistry) Fast-Start - $300,000

Transitions in prehistory: subsistence and health change in northern Chile
Dr Sian Halcrow (Anatomy) $720,000

Redox regulation of cell death
Associate Professor Mark Hampton (Pathology, Christchurch) $815,000

The evolution of the functional diversity of forests
Professor Steven Higgins (Botany) $808,000
Other Principal Investigator: Associate Professor David Bryant (Mathematics and Statistics)

The causes and consequences of multidimensional individual specialisation in freshwater fish
Dr Travis Ingram (Zoology) $300,000 (Fast-Start)

Oxytocin: a safety brake preventing excessive activation of the stress axis
Dr Karl Iremonger (Physiology) Fast-Start - $300,000

A new politics of peace? Investigations in contemporary pacifism and nonviolence
Professor Richard Jackson (National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies) $595,000

Captured in amber: ecological complexity in New Zealand's ancient araucarian forests
Associate Professor Daphne Lee (Geology) $810,000
Other Principal Investigator: Dr Dallas Mildenhall (GNS Science)

Making war or babies: division of labour and social evolution in parasites
Professor Robert Poulin (Zoology) $790,000
Are genetic shifts in dispersal ability key to resolving the “paradox of the great speciators”?
Dr Bruce Robertson (Zoology) $808,000
Other Principal Investigator: Dr Sonya Clegg (University of Oxford, UK)

Dressing for survival and success: what pre-European Maori wore for adaptive realization
Dr Catherine Smith (Applied Sciences) Fast-Start - $300,000

Slow creep or fast rupture in faults? Linking nature and experiment to understand the earthquake source
Dr Steven Smith (Geology) Fast-Start - $300,000

Developing inversion methods for non-stationary thinning of point processes
Dr Ting Wang (Mathematics & Statistics) Fast-Start - $300,000

Use it or lose it: unravelling the genetic basis of flight-loss in New Zealand's alpine insects
Professor Jon Waters (Zoology) $808,000

ENDS

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