Search Marsden awards 2008–2017
Search awarded Marsden Fund grants 2008–2017
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Standard
Year Awarded: 2008
Title: Taming reactive main group element hydrides
Recipient(s): Prof W Henderson | PI | University of Waikato
Prof E Hey-Hawkins | AI | University of Leipzig
Prof BK Nicholson | AI | University of Waikato
Public Summary: The hydrides of the heavier main group elements (e.g. sulfur, selenium, phosphorus, arsenic etc) are important chemical precursors, but are invariably highly noxious (toxic, stench, spontaneously flammable). Building on our earlier discovery that the organometallic ferrocenyl group imparts dramatic air stability in a series of primary phosphanes and arsanes, we will explore if the ferrocenyl group can confer stability, and hence 'user-friendliness' to the hydrides of other heavy elements.
Total Awarded: $460,444
Duration: 3
Host: University of Waikato
Contact Person: Prof W Henderson
Panel: PSE
Project ID: 08-UOW-007
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Standard
Year Awarded: 2017
Title: Tāngata Tiriti: Learning the trick of standing upright here
Recipient(s): Dr A Bell | PI | The University of Auckland
Dr BJ Lythberg | PI | University of Auckland Business School
Associate Professor CR Woods | PI | The University of Auckland
Public Summary: Little is known of the views and experiences of tāngata tiriti in relation to Māori and the Treaty of Waitangi in the ‘post-Treaty settlement’ era. What do the Treaty and treaty settlements mean to these New Zealanders? What are their relationships with Māori and does the idea of Treaty relationships inform these engagements? And, how do these understandings and relationships impact their sense of identity and belonging as New Zealanders?
By exploring these questions via interviews with tāngata tiriti in a range of professions throughout New Zealand, we will provide counter-narratives to those that position the Treaty as purely an issue for Māori and the Crown. The concept of tāngata tiriti, central to this project, extends the Treaty partnership beyond Māori and Pākehā, offering us all a place to stand in relation to the Treaty. The stories of relationship, partnership and identity we gather from non-Māori New Zealanders working closely and constructively with Māori across a range of social fields will provide accounts of those learning ‘the trick of standing upright here’. Our research will advance theoretical knowledge about Treaty partnerships and indigenous–non-indigenous relations, and contribute to a national conversation about partnership and the Treaty in the ‘post-settlement’ era.
Total Awarded: $845,000
Duration: 3
Host: The University of Auckland
Contact Person: Dr AB Bell
Panel: SOC
Project ID: 17-UOA-229
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Fast-Start
Year Awarded: 2015
Title: Targeted, triggered and zero waste prodrug activation
Recipient(s): Dr AB Gamble | PI | University of Otago
Public Summary: Most promising drugs fail to progress to the clinic due to off-target toxicity; thus, the best drug to treat a disorder may not become available to patients. Additionally, costs to the pharmaceutical industry of drug failure are huge, discouraging future investment. As medicinal chemists, we need to find innovative ways to improve drug selectivity and efficacy while reducing toxicity. We propose that toxicity could be reduced through delivering drugs in a more disease-targeted fashion. A prodrug, a drug that has been chemically modified to be invisible to normal, healthy tissue, can be designed to reveal the active drug only at the disease site. However, by-products generated during this process can still cause unwanted toxic effects. To overcome this problem, we will investigate a prodrug that is targeted to and activated specifically at the disease site, converting a normally toxic by-product into the actual drug - a targeted, triggered and zero waste prodrug activation strategy. This new knowledge will have implications for many types of disease including cancer, CNS disorders and infectious disease.
Total Awarded: $300,000
Duration: 3
Host: University of Otago
Contact Person: Dr AB Gamble
Panel: PCB
Project ID: 15-UOO-163
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Standard
Year Awarded: 2017
Title: TB or not TB - examining the origin and evolution of tuberculosis in the pre-European Pacific
Recipient(s): Dr M Knapp | PI | University of Otago
Professor HR Buckley | AI | University of Otago
Professor GM Cook | AI | University of Otago
Professor J Krause | AI | Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
Professor RK Walter | AI | University of Otago
Public Summary: The origin and antiquity of tuberculosis (TB) in the Pacific is controversial. TB-causing Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex (MTBC) bacteria are thought to have arrived with European sailors or settlers but TB-like lesions in pre-European skeletal remains from across the Pacific contradict this popular view. We will combine palaeogenetic and macroscopic analyses of pre-European human and animal remains to determine how TB arrived and evolved in the Pacific. This study has the potential to fundamentally alter our understanding of how TB spread around the world and to provide new insights into how MTBC bacteria adapt to human hosts and alter their potential for causing epidemics.
Total Awarded: $920,000
Duration: 3
Host: University of Otago
Contact Person: Dr M Knapp
Panel: EEB
Project ID: 17-UOO-225
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Standard
Year Awarded: 2015
Title: Te ao hou: transforming worlds in New Zealand 1900-1950
Recipient(s): Professor Dame Anne Salmond | PI | The University of Auckland
Associate Professor CP McCarthy | AI | Victoria University of Wellington
Professor PJ Tapsell | AI | University of Otago
Public Summary: From the turn of the twentieth century, strategic alliances between Maori and Pakeha leaders and scholars produced a series of revolutionary, globally unique socio-cultural experiments that transformed colonial relations, drawing international attention to New Zealand. These combined matauranga and toi maori (Maori ancestral knowledge and art forms) with European knowledge traditions and technologies, opening the way for today's Treaty processes and initiatives of cultural and economic revitalization. Despite the lessons these early initiatives offer post-colonial enquiry and contemporary tribal development, our knowledge of this pivotal era remains fragmentary.
Our research lends momentum to its still-unfolding legacy by exploring in detail how the interweaving of Maori and European ideas, institutions and technologies challenged colonial structures and generated ground-breaking programs in the arts, sciences, law and economy, in which Maori played - and continue to play - leading roles.
Building on existing relationships with iwi and institutional partners, we deploy museum and archival research, cutting-edge technologies and powerful ancestral frameworks to explore the ideas and reassemble the taonga generated by these pioneering initiatives, contributing to international scholarly debates and to present-day Maori-led innovations in law, land use and cultural and economic revitalisation.
Total Awarded: $685,000
Duration: 3
Host: The University of Auckland
Contact Person: Professor Dame Anne Salmond
Panel: SOC
Project ID: 15-UOA-013
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Standard
Year Awarded: 2009
Title: Te Ao Tawhito: the ancient Maori world
Recipient(s): Professor A Salmond | PI | The University of Auckland
Dr PJ McRae | AI | The University of Auckland
H Sadler | AI | The University of Auckland
Dr J Te Rito | AI | The University of Auckland
Public Summary: This project addresses a topic of enduring fascination, the nature of Maori life prior to contact with Europeans. As the last significant land-mass on earth to have been settled by people, New Zealand presented many challenges to the ancestors of Maori when they arrived from their tropical homelands. By the time the first Europeans arrived, Maori existence was regionally variable and rapidly changing, although it has often been depicted as homogeneous and static. We aim to revitalise current understandings of Te Ao Tawhito (the ancient Maori world), drawing upon a rich array of sources, Maori philosophies and contemporary theoretical insights.
Total Awarded: $653,333
Duration: 3
Host: The University of Auckland
Contact Person: Professor A Salmond
Panel: SOC
Project ID: 09-UOA-046
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Standard
Year Awarded: 2014
Title: Te Mauria Whiritoi: the sky as a cultural resource - Maori astronomy, ritual and ecological knowledge
Recipient(s): Dr RL Matamua | PI | University of Waikato
Dr P Harris | AI | Victoria University of Wellington
Dr HP Whaanga | AI | University of Waikato
Dr CMK Baker | AI | University of Hawai‘i at Manoa
Dr A Hardy | AI | University of Waikato
Professor R Hannah | AI | University of Waikato
Public Summary: The human race has always used the canvas of the night sky to embed historical, scientific and cultural knowledge. Early cultures orientated their beliefs, practices and understandings around the movement of the celestial bodies. Their detailed observations were interlaced with ecological and environmental information that was manifested and reaffirmed in ceremony and cultural practice. This project, Te Mauria Whiritoi, is an examination of Maori beliefs, practices and observations in relation to astronomy, ecology and ritual. Using archaeoastronomy, cultural astronomy, oral history, semi-structured interviews, surveys, Wananga and environmental observations, we investigate how astronomy impacts upon ritual practice and is influenced by ecological and societal change. We will explore the interconnectedness between multiple disciplines from a traditional context, while also examining its contemporary application in our modern society through celebrations such as Matariki. This project will identify the sophisticated knowledge that is still encoded and integrated across many aspects of Maori life and is embedded within the Maori landscape. We will collect and preserve a significant body of Maori astronomical knowledge that might otherwise be lost, benefiting cultural and linguistic sustainability and environmental practice in Aotearoa.
Total Awarded: $710,000
Duration: 3
Host: University of Waikato
Contact Person: Dr RL Matamua
Panel: SOC
Project ID: 14-UOW-004
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Fast-Start
Year Awarded: 2009
Title: Teaching an old brain new tricks
Recipient(s): Dr B Thompson | PI | The University of Auckland
Dr CM Stinear | AI | The University of Auckland
Public Summary: The adult brain is resistant to change at a neural level. This limits the acquisition of new skills and the potential for recovery from brain damage. Recent high-profile research has shown that the antidepressant drug Fluoxetine promotes plasticity within the adult mouse brain. I will apply these findings directly to humans, testing the prediction that Fluoxetine will promote learning in normal adults and facilitate recovery of vision in amblyopia; a disorder of the visual cortex. This project will establish a new multidisciplinary research stream within New Zealand and may provide the foundation for novel approaches to treating brain disorders.
Total Awarded: $266,667
Duration: 3
Host: The University of Auckland
Contact Person: Dr B Thompson
Panel: BMS
Project ID: 09-UOA-067
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Standard
Year Awarded: 2011
Title: Temporal cavity solitons: light pulses in a box for information processing
Recipient(s): Dr SC Coen | PI | The University of Auckland
Dr SG Murdoch | PI | The University of Auckland
Assoc Prof NGR Broderick | AI | The University of Auckland
Public Summary: Imagine capturing light pulses and storing them in a box. Indefinitely. This dream is now a reality with the first observation in 2010 by the PI and others of temporal cavity solitons in a seemingly simple system: a passive loop of optical fibre driven by a continuous-wave laser. This naturally leads to the realization of an all-optical buffer, a critical device for advanced telecommunication routing technology, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. Degraded pulses in a binary-encoded data stream should all be attracted and reshaped into identical temporal cavity solitons, hence regenerating the data as well as buffering it. All-optical logic operations are also possible. More fundamentally, these pulses interact inelastically like particles, they can repel and merge, and may constitute the most fundamental example of self-organization. We will make a full experimental investigation of the rich fundamental nonlinear dynamical behaviour of these light-made structures and evaluate their potential in a realistic telecommunication context. Our work could also explain the generation of broadband frequency combs recently observed in microresonators and which constitute a key technology for the development of a new generation of ultra-precise optical clocks. In fact, these combs could just be cavity solitons in hiding.
Total Awarded: $717,391
Duration: 3
Host: The University of Auckland
Contact Person: Dr SC Coen
Panel: PCB
Project ID: 11-UOA-243
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Fast-Start
Year Awarded: 2013
Title: Territorial disputes and civil society in Northeast Asian democracies
Recipient(s): Dr A Bukh | PI | Victoria University of Wellington
Public Summary: This project joins the academic debate on territorial disputes in Northeast Asia and seeks to explore the role of civil society groups in shaping related debates and policies.
After the end of the Cold War bipolar rivalry, territorial disputes became one of the major sources of friction in the region. Civil society groups are playing an increasingly important role in shaping domestic politics related to these disputes. However, the voluminous body of academic literature devoted to the international and domestic politics of the disputes, as well as literature on civil society in Northeast Asia, have paid very limited attention to these groups.
The proposed project focuses on the region's most important democracies (Japan, South Korea and Taiwan) and looks into groups concerned with territorial disputes over the South Kuriles, the Dokdo and the Senkaku islands. Drawing its theoretical insights from the pluralist theory of Foreign Policy Analysis and framing approach in Social Movements theory, this study will explore and compare the direct and indirect policy effects of territorial dispute activism in the three countries. It will also analyse the socio-historical background of this activism and explicate the interests and mobilisation strategies of the advocacy groups in question.
Total Awarded: $300,000
Duration: 3
Host: Victoria University of Wellington
Contact Person: Dr A Bukh
Panel: SOC
Project ID: 13-VUW-087