Search Marsden awards 2008–2017
Search awarded Marsden Fund grants 2008–2017
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Fast-Start
Year Awarded: 2016
Title: The ocean vacuum-cleaner: Salp effects on the marine carbon cycle
Recipient(s): Dr MR Decima | PI | NIWA - The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research Ltd
Dr A Gutierrez Rodriguez | AI | NIWA - The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research Ltd
Professor EA Pakhomov | AI | University of British Columbia
Professor MR Stukel | AI | Florida State University, Tallahassee
Public Summary: Salp blooms (chain-forming zooplankton) have the unique effect of ‘vacuuming’ the upper ocean, clearing microplankton from large volumes of water and delivering particles to the deep-sea in the form of condensed faecal pellets, that can sink to the bottom in a day. They have the potential to remove large quantities of nitrogen while enhancing removal of CO2, affecting both biological growth and grazing processes in the upper ocean, and biogeochemical cycling of major elements. Despite the disproportionate role they potentially play in ecosystem functions, their effect on annual regional upper ocean carbon budgets and trophic interactions has not been assessed, mainly due to their episodic nature and short-lived presence in the surface ocean. We will assess their role in restructuring lower food-web dynamics, specifically their impact on phytoplankton growth and selection of particular species, ultimately linked to carbon and nitrogen removal to the deep ocean. Using state-of-the-art molecular, isotope, pigment, and image analysis tools, we will focus on the highly productive New Zealand Chatham Rise region, where salp dynamics have the potential to significantly alter our current paradigms of oceanic carbon fluxes.
Total Awarded: $300,000
Duration: 3
Host: National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research Ltd
Contact Person: Dr MR Decima
Panel: EEB
Project ID: 16-NIW-025
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Standard
Year Awarded: 2016
Title: The origin of UV photoprotection in the brown skin pigment eumelanin
Recipient(s): Dr JM Hodgkiss | PI | Victoria University of Wellington
Professor P Meredith | AI | University of Queensland
Public Summary: The natural brown skin pigment eumelanin protects us from UV light by intercepting photons and dissipating their energy before proteins and DNA are damaged. Eumelanin’s photoprotection mechanism is masked by its extreme chemical and physical complexity, which may in fact be essential to its function. In this project, we aim to understand how eumelanin so effectively dissipates UV energy by interrogating this process using timed sequences of extremely short laser pulses. We will use three complementary broadband ultrafast methods – ultrafast fluorescence, ultrafast transient absorption, and femtosecond stimulated Raman spectroscopies – to elucidate the electronic and structural relaxation pathways in eumelanin. We will apply global data analysis to unify the results and establish whether disorder indeed plays a functional role, as well is interrogating the effects of delocalised excitonic states and excited state proton transfer. Drawing from approaches that we used to understand disordered semiconductor films, along with entirely novel spectroscopic methods, we have a unique opportunity to resolve this elusive problem in photobiology. This new knowledge may guide the design of new optical components and sunscreens, and the new tools developed may later be applied to a host of other biomaterials that undergo UV photochemistry.
Total Awarded: $870,000
Duration: 3
Host: Victoria University of Wellington
Contact Person: Dr JM Hodgkiss
Panel: PCB
Project ID: 16-VUW-115
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Standard
Year Awarded: 2016
Title: The origins and development of pre-European contact musical instruments in Aotearoa (New Zealand), Rekohu and Rangiaotea (Chatham and Pitt Islands).
Recipient(s): Dr JA Cattermole | PI | University of Otago
Mr MA Solomon | PI | Hokotehi Moriori Trust
Associate Professor IG Barber | AI | University of Otago
Mr AW Fraser | AI | Private Individual
Mr J Webster | AI | Private Individual
Public Summary: This research addresses a significant problem of culture change in Polynesian ethnomusicology and anthropology. We aim to discover how the first southern Polynesian colonists of Aotearoa, Rekohu and Rangihaute – and their descendents – adapted tropical musical instruments and traditions to the new resources of a large, cool-seasonal continental island group. We ask: what stayed the same? What changed, where, how and why? In addition to employing a range of traditional research methods (ethnographic interviews, visual comparisons, archaeological dating, literary research), this research will be the first to create 3D models of taonga pūoro based on CT scan data. We will also undertake the most in-depth experimental organological research to date (based on all existing sources of evidence) to create new knowledge of Moriori musical instruments. In filling a substantial knowledge gap concerning the origins and development of taonga pūoro, our findings will have significant implications for wider studies of the history of Aotearoa, Rekohu and Rangihaute, enabling theories regarding patterns of Polynesian migration and cultural development to be tested. The comparative nature of this research, and its focus on indigenous material cultures, makes it of national and international significance.
Total Awarded: $530,000
Duration: 3
Host: University of Otago
Contact Person: Dr JA Cattermole
Panel: SOC
Project ID: 16-UOO-045
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Standard
Year Awarded: 2015
Title: The origins of social inequality in Southeast Asia: an exploration of health and wealth disparity at the emergence of state level society
Recipient(s): Associate Professor HR Buckley | PI | University of Otago
Professor CFW Higham | PI | University of Otago
Dr AK Carter | AI | University of Wisconsin Madison
Dr BH Bellina | AI | Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Dr CC Castillo | AI | University College London
Dr CL King | AI | University of Otago
Dr KA Douka | AI | University of Oxford
Dr LG Shewan | AI | Monash University
Dr SE Halcrow | AI | University of Otago
Dr TFG Higham | AI | University of Oxford
Dr TO Pryce | AI | Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Public Summary: Social inequality is the common factor in all early state societies, and understanding how it arises is as pressing today as in the past. We seek to trace and explain how this was generated among the ancestors of the civilization of Angkor by integrating archaeology with human biology at the late Iron Age site of Non Ban Jak in Northeast Thailand. This town was occupied during a period of rapid social change and superbly preserved human remains interred within houses present a unique opportunity to test a new model to understand how a social elite arose. Non Ban Jak is a large Iron Age town that rises within encircling moats and banks into two distinct mounds. On the western mound the dead were interred with the implements of manual labour within modest dwellings while the eastern houses became increasingly substantial over time with wealthy burials. It seems likely, therefore, that two classes emerged there, signifying the beginning of social disparity in the community. Identifying the relative wealth and health of the community over time, using new and established archaeology and bioarchaeology methods, is the key to testing a new model of biosocial change for understanding how state formation developed.
Total Awarded: $767,000
Duration: 3
Host: University of Otago
Contact Person: Associate Professor HR Buckley
Panel: EHB
Project ID: 15-UOO-018
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Standard
Year Awarded: 2011
Title: The p53 tumour suppressor and its nemesis: does a p53 isoform promote cancer through an inflammatory pathway?
Recipient(s): Prof AW Braithwaite | PI | University of Otago
Prof MA Baird | PI | University of Otago
Public Summary: p53 is the pre-eminent tumour suppressor gene. Proper p53 functioning is therefore important in the prevention of cancers. Recently, twelve naturally occurring variants or isoforms of human p53 were identified, one of which (133p53) is present at unusually high levels in several human cancers and antagonizes normal p53 function. These data suggest that this isoform might promote rather than prevent cancer forming, thus acting as p53’s ‘nemesis’. We constructed a mouse that makes the equivalent of 133p53 (designated 122p53) and have shown that the mice are tumour prone. Thus, 122p53 (and by implication 133p53) can function as a cancer promoting agent (ie an oncogene). These mice also show evidence of enhanced cell growth and widespread inflammation that occur prior to the onset of cancer. The inflammation is likely to be due to increased levels of the pro-inflammatory cytokine IL-6 in the blood. In this proposal we investigate whether reducing inflammation can prevent cancers forming, delay their onset or reduce their severity. We also investigate how 122p53 can cause cells to grow faster. These experiments will tell us how 122p53 causes cancer which could lead to novels ways of treating cancers in humans.
Total Awarded: $747,826
Duration: 3
Host: University of Otago
Contact Person: Prof AW Braithwaite
Panel: BMS
Project ID: 11-UOO-026
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Standard
Year Awarded: 2014
Title: The permeability of the Antarctic vortex
Recipient(s): Dr GE Bodeker | PI | Bodeker Scientific
Ms KE Cooper | AI | Google Inc.
Dr SM Dean | AI | National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research
Dr H Garny | AI | Deutsches Zentrum für Luft-und Raumfahrt
Public Summary: Dynamical processes that occur in the stratosphere between 15 and 50 km above Earth's surface, can affect our weather and climate. The vortex of westerly winds that encircles the Antarctic stratosphere in the winter and spring of each year is a defining dynamical feature of the Southern Hemisphere stratosphere. The permeability of the vortex edge determines the north to south gradient in a number of trace gases. Many of these trace gases, such as ozone, are radiatively active gases whose morphology defines temperature gradients in the stratosphere. The processes controlling the permeability of the Antarctic vortex, and how they are likely to respond to a changing climate, have not been well studied and, as a result, are not well simulated in atmosphere-ocean global climate models. Starting this year, hundreds, and eventually thousands, of long-duration stratospheric balloons will be flown by Google to provide Internet access to remote locations. We will use balloon position and temperature data to reveal in unprecedented detail the transport and small-scale turbulent diffusion processes active in the southern middle and high latitude stratosphere which determine the permeability of the vortex. Our research will add to fundamental understanding of stratospheric dynamics and its role in climate.
Total Awarded: $785,000
Duration: 3
Host: Bodeker Scientific
Contact Person: Dr GE Bodeker
Panel: ESA
Project ID: 14-BDS-001
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Fast-Start
Year Awarded: 2013
Title: The physics of molecular delivery by electroporation of the stratum corneum: local transport region initiation and evolution
Recipient(s): Dr SM Becker | PI | University of Canterbury
Professor D Miklavcic | AI | University of Ljubljana
Public Summary: Electroporation of the skin is becoming a prominent clinical method of targeted transdermal drug and gene delivery in which the skin is exposed to a series of electric pulses. The field still lacks the mechanistic description that captures the physics underlying both the initiation of this phenomenon, and also the associated transient changes of the stratum corneum architecture. In a combination of experimental and numerical simulations we will define the physics governing the lipid thermodynamic response to an applied electric field. This knowledge will be used in order to develop safer, more reliable protocols of skin electroporation treatments.
Total Awarded: $300,000
Duration: 3
Host: University of Canterbury
Contact Person: Dr SM Becker
Panel: EIS
Project ID: 13-UOC-012
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Standard
Year Awarded: 2008
Title: The Polynesian iconoclasm
Recipient(s): Assoc Prof JD Sissons | PI | Victoria University of Wellington
Public Summary: In eastern Polynesia conversions to Christianity were inaugurated by the mass destruction of religious images and marae or temples in which they were stored. Taken together these destructive episodes during the twenty-year period between 1815 and 1835 can be understood as a single event which I term The Polynesian Iconoclasm. This project will bring together accounts and analyses of iconoclasm in French Polynesia, Hawai'i and the Cook Islands into a book titled The Polynesian Iconoclasm. An Introductory chapter will situate this iconoclasm in relation to other great iconoclasms, religious and revolutionary, emphasising its world historical significance.
Total Awarded: $324,444
Duration: 3
Host: Victoria University of Wellington
Contact Person: Assoc Prof JD Sissons
Panel: HUM
Project ID: 08-VUW-058
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Standard
Year Awarded: 2010
Title: The power of the trivial: How do trivial images create immediate illusions of memories and beliefs?
Recipient(s): Prof M Garry | PI | Victoria University of Wellington
Dr DM Bernstein | AI | Kwantlen Polytechnic University
Prof SD Lindsay | AI | University of Victoria
Public Summary: Scientists have understood for decades that what we know about ourselves and the world is riddled with false details, mistaken 'facts,' and impossible events. Indeed, for many years some of us in the scientific community have studied how people to come believe and remember all kinds of false information. We have discovered that when coupled with a false suggestion, photographs are especially powerful in cultivating these false cognitions. Over the past decade, we have produced a body of work leading us to conclude that photographs change people's memories and beliefs slowly—over days or weeks—when memories erode and cognitive processing goes awry. But we were wrong. It does not take a false suggestion. It does not take days or weeks. It takes only a claim that a person must judge as being true or false in three seconds, paired with a trivially related photo, for most people to come to believe false cognitions. We propose a series of experiments to investigate the mechanisms driving this effect. Our findings have important implications for theories of cognition and memory, and implications for real-world practice in the media, public information campaigns, and advertising.
Total Awarded: $434,783
Duration: 3
Host: Victoria University of Wellington
Contact Person: Prof M Garry
Panel: EHB
Project ID: 10-VUW-020
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Standard
Year Awarded: 2014
Title: The price is right? Sin taxes and consumption
Recipient(s): Professor JK Gibson | PI | University of Waikato
Dr TVT Le | AI | University of Waikato
Dr MA Andalon | AI | University of Melbourne
Dr S Olivia | AI | University of Waikato
Public Summary: Correct estimates of how quantity demanded falls as prices rise are fundamental for evaluating public policies like sin taxes on tobacco products and proposed taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages. Existing studies in economics and public health are likely to have overstated the magnitude of quantity responses to price rises. Consequently, there is likely to be excessive optimism over the scope for sin taxes to cut consumption of items like soft drinks and tobacco as ways to improve health. Consumers adjust to higher prices by reducing quantity, and also by downgrading the quality (cost per unit) of what they consume. But the existing literature ignores quality responses. Instead, the demand estimation framework used with survey data wrongly treats any consumer response on the quality margin as a quantity response. In order to correct this error, innovation is needed in terms of the survey data and estimation frameworks used to estimate demand responses, so that consumers’ choices of both quantity and quality are correctly modelled. The proposed research is the first systematic study of bias from ignoring quality responses when modelling effects of tax-induced price rises on quantity, and is also the first study of data options to mitigate this bias.
Total Awarded: $700,000
Duration: 3
Host: University of Waikato
Contact Person: Professor JK Gibson
Panel: EHB
Project ID: 14-UOW-014