Victoria research flourishes in Marsden funding
Victoria University of Wellington researchers have received 26 prestigious Marsden Fund grants worth $14.3 million, the largest number ever received by the University and more than 22 percent of the total funding awarded in 2016.
The Marsden Fund supports research excellence, allowing New Zealand’s most talented researchers to explore ideas at the forefront of their disciplines. The Fund is administered by the Royal Society of New Zealand on behalf of the Government.
Victoria University researchers received 22.2 percent of total Marsden grants, securing 26 out of the 117 research projects funded nationwide.
Victoria projects awarded funding range from research into nanoparticles, glaciers and election turnouts to gender, Māori traditional calendars and the cosmic web.
Of the 26 successful Victoria researchers, 16 are in the Faculty of Science, and six of those are in the School of Chemical and Physical Sciences.
Four grants were awarded to researchers in the humanities, three to engineering staff, two for education research, and one to staff in the Faculty of Law.
The funding consists of 17 Standard grants for established researchers and nine Fast-Start grants for researchers early in their careers.
Of particular note is the $565,000 awarded to Professor Rod Downey for a project titled ‘The mathematics of computation’. This is Professor Downey’s ninth Marsden grant as a Principal Investigator, putting him among an elite group of researchers to consistently win funding over many years.
Vice-Provost (Research) Professor Kate McGrath says the results are excellent and confirm the strength of research capability at Victoria.
“These successful projects reflect the world-leading and potentially game-changing research being carried out at Victoria.
“A particular highlight is Victoria’s growing reputation as a leader in the physical and chemical sciences, with staff in this area awarded Marsden funding of just under $4.5 million. In addition, the two grants awarded to researchers from the Faculty of Education is notable and an outstanding achievement.
“As a global-civic capital city university, we want to lead thinking on major societal, economic and environmental issues. This success gives us assurance that our research is of the highest calibre.”
Victoria University recipients of Marsden Grants (with funds to be distributed over three years) are:
Standard grants
- Dr Shen Vun Chong (Robinson Research Institute): Nanostructuring in iron-based wires for ultra-high current density, $720,000
- Dr Joel Colon-Rios (Law): Constituent power and the law, $420,000
- Professor Carmen Dalli (Education): War and peace in the nursery: How do young children negotiate conflict to establish belonging and wellbeing in a multi-ethnic New Zealand early childhood centre, $735,000
- Professor Simon Davy (Biological Sciences): From parasitism to mutualism: Symbiosis interaction states and the adaptability of reef corals to climate change, $830,000
- Professor Rod Downey (Mathematics and Statistics): The mathematics of computation, $565,000
- Dr Pauline Harris (Chemical and Physical Sciences): Ngā Takahuringā ō te ao: The effect of climate change on traditional Māori calendars, $720,000
- Dr Justin Hodgkiss (Chemical and Physical Sciences): The origin of UV photoprotection in the brown skin pigment eumelanin, $870,000
- Associate Professor Melanie Johnston-Hollitt (Chemical and Physical Sciences): Mapping the cosmic web with the Murchison Widefield Array, $870,000
- Professor Estate Khmaladze (Mathematics and Statistics): On the theory of distribution-free tests for statistical hypothesis and unitary operators in functional spaces, $585,000
- Professor Bastiaan Kleijn (Engineering and Computer Science): Distributed processing with information privacy in sensor networks, $790,000
- Professor Eric Le Ru (Chemical and Physical Sciences): Probing the optical absorption of molecules adsorbed on metallic nanoparticles, $840,000
- Associate Professor Ivy Liu (Mathematics and Statistics): Dimension reduction for mixed type multivariate data, $550,000
- Dr Peter Ritchie (Biological Sciences): Testing for fishing-induced evolution using DNA from ancient and modern snapper, $830,000
- Dr Sarah Ross (English, Film, Theatre and Media Studies): ‘Woe is me': Women and complaint in the English Renaissance, $450,000
- Associate Professor Jeff Sissons (Social and Cultural Studies): The mysterious disappearance of tuuaahu, $390,000
- Dr Mattie Timmer (Chemical and Physical Sciences): The missing link: A traceless linking strategy for the conjugation of complex carbohydrates to proteins and peptides, $870,000
- Professor Jack Vowles (History, Philosophy, Political Science and International Relations): A 'Big Data' approach to the problem of electoral turnout, $635,000
Fast-Start grants
- Dr Shaun Eaves (Antarctic Research Centre): Establishing natural baselines of glacier variability in a warm world, $300,000
- Dr Lorena Gibson (Social and Cultural Studies): East side orchestras: Music, poverty, and social change, $300,000
- Dr Alia Martin (Psychology): Children's understanding of shared knowledge and its importance for effective communication, $300,000
- Dr Yi Mei (Engineering and Computer Science): Automatic design of heuristics for dynamic arc routing problem with genetic programming, $300,000
- Dr Polly Stupples (Geography, Environment and Earth Sciences): Stretching the celluloid ceiling: Women's creative agency in the emergent Pacific film industry, $300,000
- Dr Tirta Susilo (Psychology): Fractionating face blindness: Creating a taxonomy for developmental prosopagnosia, $300,000
- Dr Bronwyn Wood (Education): Citizenship in Aotearoa New Zealand: Young people, belonging and changing times, $300,000
- Dr Bing Xue (Engineering and Computer Science): Large-scale evolutionary feature selection for classification, $300,000
- Dr Cathie Zheng (Chemical and Physical Sciences): Finding the needle by removing the haystack: Modeling diffuse foregrounds to detect the epoch of reionization, $300,000
More information on the 2016 Marsden Fund grants can be found on the Royal Society's website.