Search Marsden awards 2008–2017
Search awarded Marsden Fund grants 2008–2017
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Fast-Start
Year Awarded: 2013
Title: It takes all types: behavioural variation and the survival of New Zealand birds in human dominated landscapes
Recipient(s): Dr KA Parker | PI | Massey University
Public Summary: Humans show great variation in personality and behavioural traits. Some people are loud and gregarious while others are shy and reclusive. Most are somewhere in between these two extremes. Intriguingly, such individualistic behaviour also varies in animals, something immediately obvious to anybody who has regular contact with domestic animals. This variation in behaviour is also readily apparent in wild animals. Therefore, as humans continue to dominate the earth’s ecosystems an increasingly pertinent question is “How does behavioural variation affect survival in a human dominated landscape?” Modified landscapes have driven many species to extinction while others survive and thrive. Do bold extroverts survive more readily in fragmented isolated landscapes or do the meek prevail? To address these questions I will study behavioural variation in North Island (NI) robins (Petroica longipes). NI robins are present on islands and the mainland, as both natural and translocated populations. They are friendly and readily trained to approach for a food treat. I will investigate how behaviour varies within and among robin populations, how it affects translocation success and ultimately individual survival and population persistence. This work represents a critical advance in understanding the ecological, evolutionary and conservation significance of behavioural variation in individuals and populations.
Total Awarded: $300,000
Duration: 3
Host: Massey University
Contact Person: Dr KA Parker
Panel: EEB
Project ID: 13-MAU-126
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Fast-Start
Year Awarded: 2009
Title: Iwasawa theory for supersingular primes
Recipient(s): Dr B Kim | PI | Victoria University of Wellington
Public Summary: Number theory is a branch of mathematics that studies the properties of rational numbers. For example, we study the distribution of prime numbers and the solutions of rational polynomials. I study an elliptic curve, which is a curve given by a rational polynomial of degree 2 in Y and degree 3 in X. It has many mysterious properties, and played a crucial role in the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem. My goal is understanding elliptic curves with a novel theory called Iwasawa theory.
Total Awarded: $266,667
Duration: 3
Host: Victoria University of Wellington
Contact Person: Dr B Kim
Panel: MIS
Project ID: 09-VUW-027
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Fast-Start
Year Awarded: 2017
Title: Judging the Commerce of Empire: International Law and the British Court of Admiralty 1798-1875
Recipient(s): Dr B Marten | PI | Victoria University of Wellington
Public Summary: The English High Court of Admiralty sat at the heart of the world’s largest maritime empire. It dealt with a wide range of cases involving foreign vessels, seafarers, cargoes and sovereigns. All manner of questions came through its doors – from the suppression of slavery and piracy through to blockade-running, captures on the high seas, and the plight of seafarers abandoned far from home. As global shipping expanded during the nineteenth century the Court reached the height of its influence, but the nature of that influence remains underexplored. This project will bring to life the Court’s interactions with international legal issues, providing the first detailed account of how it became an important player within the complex legal and political geography of the British Empire. Drawing on both reported and archival sources, the project will reveal an important period in the evolution of private and public international law, intersecting with narratives of empire, global trade, and the maritime world.
Total Awarded: $300,000
Duration: 3
Host: Victoria University of Wellington
Contact Person: Dr B Marten
Panel: HUM
Project ID: 17-VUW-040
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Standard
Year Awarded: 2011
Title: Karl Popper: a life
Recipient(s): Prof BB Boyd | PI | The University of Auckland
Public Summary: Karl Popper (1902-1994) has been ranked the greatest of twentieth-century philosophers, along with Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein. He has also been ignored recently by some in his own main field, the philosophy of science, after having been rated “incomparably the greatest philosopher of science that has ever been.” He had a wider influence on multiple spheres—the sciences, politics, economics and finance, the arts—than even Russell or Wittgenstein. I will write the first biography of Popper, a personal and intellectual biography based on his and many other archives, on interviews around the world, and on a flood of books and articles. I will analyse his historical and intellectual contexts, the development of his thought and work, and his global impact. His memorable New Zealand years, 1937-45, when he wrote his self-styled “contribution to the war effort,” The Open Society and Its Enemies—which some regard as an essential catalyst, half a century later, for the fall of the Berlin Wall—was less than one decade in his colourful 92 years. Many think they know Popper, but in fact know him only at second hand. I want to show why those who know his work at first hand have found him so inspiring.
Total Awarded: $597,391
Duration: 3
Host: The University of Auckland
Contact Person: Prof BB Boyd
Panel: HUM
Project ID: 11-UOA-161
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Fast-Start
Year Awarded: 2014
Title: Kernels of hope: following coconut commodities from the Pacific to the West
Recipient(s): Dr AK Henderson | PI | Victoria University of Wellington
Public Summary: Coconut products have always been central to Pacific societies; they garner intensifying interest in the West. For Pacific peoples, coconuts are foci of centuries of practical, medicinal, and mythological knowledge, but as a source of export revenue since the mid-19th century, they also provide a means to development and a foothold in the global economy. For Western consumers, the 21st century allure of coconut products is spurred by scientific research on their health benefits and popular movements towards “natural” or “primitive” diet and lifestyle choices. A paradox emerges: Westerners consume coconut commodities to replicate the purported health of mythic island natives, while Pacific people grow and sell them to integrate further into global patterns of consumption. This project explores this paradox by following one significant coconut commodity, virgin coconut oil, from points of production in two Pacific nations, though sites of circulation and consumption in the United States and New Zealand, investigating: how coconut commodities become invested with people's beliefs, hopes, and aspirations at each stage of the commodity chain; what they reveal about older histories of trade and new regimes of consumption, and; how Pacific indigenous knowledge might offer both alternatives to and pathways into the global economy.
Total Awarded: $300,000
Duration: 3
Host: Victoria University of Wellington
Contact Person: Dr AK Henderson
Panel: SOC
Project ID: 14-VUW-184
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Fast-Start
Year Awarded: 2010
Title: Knowledge interfacing and power sharing in co-management: a comparative analysis
Recipient(s): Dr CL Jacobson | PI | The University of Queensland
Prof F Berkes | AI | University of Manitoba
Prof H Moller | AI | University of Otago
Prof HA Ross | AI | The University of Queensland
Public Summary: Co-management is a shared approach to environmental management between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples. A component of co-management is the weaving together of different knowledges – science, indigenous and local. However, these knowledges are paradigmatically different and therefore difficult to integrate. Knowledge issues are acknowledged as one of the most significant challenges for co-management. Governance arrangements are considered key to understanding improved methods for managing knowledge aspirations, although there is little study of exactly how they affect knowledge integration. We aim to understand aspirations related to different place-based knowledge systems, and the implications of different governance arrangements on their expression, integration and application. Understanding the linkages between institutional arrangement and the integration of different knowledges is crucial to improving co-management in practice, and requires comparative analysis. We will investigate knowledge aspirations, the effect of governance arrangements on their expression, and the ways in which they can be adapted in order to improve co-management practice, using a diversity of case studies with different governance and institutional arrangements from both New Zealand and Australia. By contrasting diverse experiences, we will be able to identify how co-management could be strengthened, and, provide pathways forward for government in a post-colonial era.
Total Awarded: $260,870
Duration: 3
Host: University of Otago
Contact Person: Dr CL Jacobson
Panel: SOC
Project ID: 10-UOO-226
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Standard
Year Awarded: 2008
Title: Korea and its neighbours: globalisation and national identity in the 21st century
Recipient(s): Dr S Epstein | PI | Victoria University of Wellington
Public Summary: This book-length study will explore how an explosion of contacts that cross national boundaries are producing rearticulations of national identity within South Korean society. A key goal is to trace the paradoxical manner in which South Korea is simultaneously becoming more cosmopolitan and more nationalistic, as well as the rapidly expanding range of 'Korean' identities. In particular, it will examine how increased travel and migration, a surge in intra-Asian media flows, and the spread of new information and communication technologies are leading to dramatic transformations in conceptions of 'Koreanness.'
Total Awarded: $262,222
Duration: 3
Host: Victoria University of Wellington
Contact Person: Dr S Epstein
Panel: HUM
Project ID: 08-VUW-042
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Standard
Year Awarded: 2013
Title: Ladies before gentlemen: investigating the molecular basis of female to male sex change in sequentially hermaphroditic fish
Recipient(s): Professor NJ Gemmell | PI | University of Otago
Dr MA Black | AI | University of Otago
Associate Professor JR Godwin | AI | North Carolina State University
Professor M Nakamura | AI | Okinawa Churasima Foundation
Mr KM Rutherford | AI | University of Otago
Dr M Wilson | AI | University of Otago
Public Summary: Most plants and animals irreversibly differentiate becoming either males or females. However, in some groups, notably fishes, individuals begin life as one sex and reverse sex sometime later in response to social cues (sequential hermaphroditism). Sex reversal in sequential hermaphrodites is complete, entailing radical restructuring of the gonad, alterations in morphology, and modifications to behaviour. The molecular basis of this stunning transformation is unknown, but is of intense interest, not only as a means to enhance our understanding of sex determination and differentiation, cellular commitment and tissue re-engineering, but also as a spectacular example of phenotypic plasticity in response to environment. Using the ubiquitous NZ spottie, together with two distant tropical relatives, the bluehead and three-spot wrasse, both leading models for sex reversal, we will undertake a series of experiments to determine the genetic pathway underlying this stunning transformation. We will use in the field ecological manipulations to produce a time series of samples taken during the process of sex reversal, and couple these with state-of-the-art gene expression analyses and comparative genomic approaches, to identify both the primary trigger and subsequent genetic cascade that results in female-male sex reversal in these fishes.
Total Awarded: $826,087
Duration: 3
Host: University of Otago
Contact Person: Professor NJ Gemmell
Panel: EEB
Project ID: 13-UOO-209
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Standard
Year Awarded: 2017
Title: Land and Agriculture in Ancient Samoa: Uncovering the Origins of the Polynesian Chiefdoms
Recipient(s): Dr EE Cochrane | PI | The University of Auckland
Dr MJ Prebble | AI | The Australian National University
Dr SJ Quintus | AI | University of Hawaii at Mānoa
Public Summary: Almost three thousand years ago small groups of voyagers from the west were the first people to reach Sāmoa. Over time, they would transform into a complex chiefdom, a centrally organized, hierarchical, socially-stratified society. The orthodox theory of chiefdom origins proposes that two cultural innovations -- control of land by a few, and technology that increased agricultural production -- sparked the social and political changes that led to chiefdoms across Polynesia. Despite a half-century of research, this theory has never been tested in Sāmoa. Our international team will investigate the prehistory of land control and agricultural development to test the orthodox theory of chiefdom origins and explain the transformation of Sāmoan society. We will use laser scanning data to create a regional map of boundaries such as rock walls used to control land. Subsequent archaeological excavation will determine boundary chronology and land use, while palaeoecological analyses of plant microfossils and sediment will allow us to reconstruct agricultural development and advanced use of crops. By analysing these datasets we will uncover how land control and agriculture contributed to the rise of the Sāmoan chiefdom, evaluate the orthodox theory of chiefdom origins, and significantly influence thinking on the functioning of stratified societies.
Total Awarded: $720,000
Duration: 3
Host: The University of Auckland
Contact Person: Dr EE Cochrane
Panel: EHB
Project ID: 17-UOA-010
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Standard
Year Awarded: 2009
Title: Lapita diet and health in Vanuatu: human adaptation to a virgin island environment
Recipient(s): Dr HR Buckley | PI | University of Otago
Dr SH Bedford | AI | Australian National University
Public Summary: The Lapita period of Pacific colonisation was one of the most significant feats of human expansion into virgin environments in world prehistory. Yet, little is known about the health of Lapita people. Bioarchaeology, the study of archaeological human skeletal remains, is the only direct means of investigating the health of past peoples. This project aims to characterise human adaptation to virgin environments during initial colonisation of the Pacific, using Lapita skeletal remains from cemetery sites in Vanuatu. Analysis of the health and diet of these people will be conducted to assess the success of population adaptation to the environment.
Total Awarded: $536,889
Duration: 3
Host: University of Otago
Contact Person: Dr HR Buckley
Panel: EHB
Project ID: 09-UOO-106