Full details of Fellows

NEW FELLOWS:

Professor Neil Broom, Department of Chemical & Materials Engineering, University of Auckland

Professor Broom has made seminal contributions to research on heart valves, joint tissue and inter-vertebral discs.

Professor Broom’s research on aortic heart valves has contributed fundamentally to understanding of the relationship between microstructure and function, and significantly influenced the procedures used in the bio-prosthetic valve manufacturing industry world wide.

Professor Broom’s work in cartilage micromechanics and osteoarthritis research includes the development of a novel experimental method for determining the internal hydrostatic fluid pressure, which enables quantification of functional changes associated with early degeneration to be tracked.

His most acclaimed research is the discovery and description of the complex micro-architecture of a collagen based 3-D bridging network system in the annular wall of the lumbar inter-vertebral disc, along with the development of a failure model of the annulus in the lumbar disc.

Dr Bryce Buddle, Eminent Scientist, AgResearch, Palmerston North 

Dr Buddle has made major contributions in pure science, applied science, and the development of successful technologies.  His specialist area of work encompasses immunology, microbiology, and applied science covering a range of diseases. He has focused on understanding the response of hosts to disease agents, and how to produce vaccines and improve diagnosis. 

Dr Buddle has advanced our understanding of a wide range of livestock diseases, including mastitis in dairy cows, Orf virus in sheep, pneumonia in sheep and goats, and yersiniosis in deer.

Yersiniosis is an important bacterial disease of deer. Dr Buddle developed a clear understanding of host responses to the bacterium, which he then used to develop a vaccine.  The vaccine was successfully commercialised, and has been in use by deer farmers in New Zealand since 1992.

Currently Dr Buddle is researching tuberculosis in wildlife and cattle.  He has undertaken a range of studies on immune responses to TB infection. Dr Buddle also leads a new research programme to develop a vaccine that could reduce methane emissions by cattle and sheep.

Professor Mark Cannell, Department of Physiology, The University of Auckland School of Medicine, Auckland 

Professor Cannell's research into excitation-contraction coupling has been some of the most important in the world. His early studies of calcium dynamics in cardiac cells are classic. He and his collaborators were the first to make a real-time video of calcium dynamics in a cardiac cell, the first to demonstrate the importance of the sodium.calcium exchanger for the removal of calcium from a cardiac cell, the first to calculate the gradients of calcium that occur in a cardiac cell during excitation, and the first to describe calcium sparks in cardiac cells.

It is now recognised that calcium sparks are one of the crucial principles of intracellular calcium dynamics.  Professor Cannell's work on calcium, originally published in the journal Science in 1993, has been cited well over 1000 times.

Professor Cannell's research has also used his modelling and imaging skills to investigate diffusion in the lens of the eye, plus protein measurement inside cells, and to study the effects of dust mite proteases on cell adhesion in the lung.

Professor Russell Gray, Department of Psychology, The University of Auckland, Auckland

Professor Gray has made outstanding contributions to several disparate areas of science which have been reliant upon his mastery of complex computational techniques, cross-disciplinary use of databases and an eye for important problems, especially in the areas of biological, cultural and linguistic evolution. 

Professor Gray was the first to apply cladistic methods that originated in biology to the phylogenetic study of languages.  By examining variations among present-day languages, he has tracked the spread of humans around the globe.

He has also discovered tool-making by New Caledonian crows.  Professor Gray documented the extraordinary ability of these birds to manufacture digging tools from pandanus leaves for extracting grubs from holes. 

Professor Gray’s research bridges the social, behavioural and biological sciences, attracting world-wide notice in two areas: one, an area of longstanding controversy, namely the origin and spread of language; and the other, revealing features in New Caledonian crows once thought to be unique to humans. 

Dr Matt McGlone, Science Leader, Biodiversity & Conservation, Landcare Research, Lincoln

Dr McGlone has recognised and taken advantage of the research opportunity offered by New Zealand’s unique geological and human migratory history.  He is a world leader in the use of fossil and sub-fossil plant pollen to reconstruct the history of New Zealand plants, from the geological epoch to near-present, human arrival time scales. 

Dr McGlone’s research has always integrated results from other research specialties into an eclectic framework.  Such data include those from macrofossils, tree rings, volcanism history, isotope data and geological history.

An important consequence has been the ability to reconstruct the vegetation cover of New Zealand prior to human settlement. There had been a tendency to deny that the first Polynesian settlers could affect vegetation cover. Dr McGlone’s work has shown that this is certainly not correct, and he was able to show the extent of the changes.

Dr McGlone has determined the original nature of the country’s flora, including changes subsequent to the last Ice Age.  This provides a benchmark against which to measure how fast some plant species have been able to adapt and respond to significant changes in the environment.

Associate Professor Jim McQuillan, Department of Chemistry, University of Otago, Dunedin

Associate Professor McQuillan achieved international recognition early in his career through his co-discovery of “Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy”. The research was published in a landmark paper in Chemical Physics Letters in 1974 and this has received over 1275 citations. This method enables molecules to be studied on electrode surfaces and provided a new approach to the study and understanding of surface chemistry and surface reactions. The method has wide application and has, for example, laid the foundations for recent research on single-molecule imaging.

Associate Professor McQuillan has continued at the forefront of discoveries in spectroscopy. He has investigated methods for the in situ UV-Visible and spectro-electrochemical characterisation of free radicals and reduction products generated at electrode surfaces and in solution.

The in situ spectroscopic methods developed by Associate Professor McQuillan are an outstanding contribution to the study of solid surfaces and solid-solution surface interactions.  These contribute to the understanding of the nature of species at the solid-solution interface and their significance in controlling the chemical reactions that take place at this interface.

Dr Martin Reyners, Principal Scientist, Institute of Geological & Nuclear Sciences, Lower Hutt

Dr Martin Reyners is New Zealand’s leader in using earthquake studies to generate knowledge of the interactions between the colliding tectonic plates that characterise the seismic and volcanic regions of the circum-Pacific belt, including New Zealand.  His studies have changed the global understanding of plate collisions by highlighting the actual physical processes of this interaction, and by demonstrating their control on surface geology and landscape by using the Southern Alps as a natural laboratory.

Dr Reyners’ studies are interdisciplinary; from locating earthquakes, through modelling of structures and processes in subduction and collisional zones, to analysing earthquake hazards and risks in a geological context.

Dr Reyners’ work has revealed the presence of fluids in the mantle and crust below New Zealand, and this has opened up new perspectives on their roles in controlling the timing and position of earthquakes and volcanism. This research was published recently in Nature.

Professor Mick Roberts, Institute of Information & Mathematical Sciences, Massey University, Auckland

Professor Roberts has brought the rigorous mathematical tool of dynamical systems to mathematical epidemiology, and furthermore he has incorporated variability by using stochastic differential equations. He has built physiological models which enable robust description and prediction of the rate and severity of both animal and human disease epidemics. Work done in conjunction with the New Zealand Ministry of Health averted a measles epidemic in New Zealand in 2001.

Earlier, when he was earlier working in AgResearch, he began a significant programme to understand and predict the spread of bovine tuberculosis using the same powerful underpinning methodologies.

Professor Roberts has recently re-examined the old Kermack-MacKendrick theory of 1927 for the spread of infectious diseases.  From this he has developed a successful approach for predicting the course of an outbreak of a newly-arrived disease, and finding means to control it. This is described in a recent paper published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London (Series B), which has been described as “the most important new development in mathematical epidemiology of infectious diseases”. 

Professor Gregory Seymour, Faculty of Dentistry, University of Otago, Dunedin

Professor Seymour is an international leader in the field of immunology of periodontal disease. His body of work ranges from cellular and molecular immunology to applied clinical research and epidemiology. Professor Seymour has made a major contribution to the understanding of how the host immune system can modify the development of periodontal disease.

More recently, Professor Seymour has made significant advances in the understanding of the relation between systemic disease and periodontal disease, the mechanisms of bone resorption and formation, and the development of a dendritic cell vaccine.

Professor Seymour’s research has received widespread international recognition, including the award of the Sir Wilfred Fish International Research Prize from the British Society for Periodontology, and the Distinguished Scientist Award from the International Association for Dental Research.

Dr Peter Tyler, Principal Scientist, Industrial Research Ltd, Lower Hutt

Dr Tyler has succeeded in creating molecules that are potent drugs. His research spans the range from pure to applied chemistry. In addition to publishing many papers in refereed journals, Dr Tyler holds 23 patents of which a remarkably high number have been commercialised, or are in the process of commercialisation. 

Dr Tyler's research succeeds in not only designing and executing synthetic procedures for complex molecules, but also effecting this synthesis with a minimal number of steps and on a scale that makes it commercially viable. Moreover, the species synthesised have been designed and optimised to mimic the transition-state of the reaction mediated by the target enzyme, not just to bind strongly to the enzyme, but as a sort of molecular plug.

More recently, Dr Tyler has succeeded in the synthesis of highly elaborated versions of the immucillins that target solid tumours and auto-immune diseases.

Dr Peter Tyler has made outstanding world-recognised contributions to synthetic organic chemistry in the direct pursuit of improved human health.

 

HONORARY FELLOWS:

Professor Terry Collins, Department of Chemistry, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA

Professor Collins is a pre-eminent chemist working at the Carnegie Mellon University in the USA and he was the recipient of the 1999 Presidential Green Chemistry Challenge Award. A citizen of New Zealand, he received his three degrees from The University of Auckland: B.Sc. (1974), M.Sc. (1st Class, 1975), and Ph.D. (1978). He has maintained important collaborations with scientists at The University of Auckland and Scion, Rotorua.

Professor Collins is internationally recognised as a leader and founder of the emerging field of green chemistry. Throughout his career, but especially in the last decade, he has spent considerable effort through his research and public communications to promote the development of the technological dimension of a sustainable high technology civilization. Green chemistry aims to reduce or eliminate hazard from chemical technologies.

Professor Collins founded the Institute for Green Oxidation Chemistry at the Carnegie Mellon University . He is the principle inventor of a new class of oxidation catalysts, called “TAML activators” which represents Carnegie Mellon’s largest investment in Intellectual Property.

Professor Collins has taken green chemistry’s message out to the broader scientific community and the general public.

Professor John Miners, Flinders University School of Medicine, Adelaide, Australia

Professor Miners is a New Zealander who has worked tirelessly to promote the development of pharmacology and toxicology in Australasia and internationally. He has a played a major role in re-vitalising ASCEPT, which is the key society for New Zealand pharmacologists and toxicologists. John Miners graduated from Victoria University of Wellington with a BSc, MSc and PhD.

Professor Miners is a world leader in the field of drug metabolism and disposition, and he has made major contributions to our understanding of two of the most important families of enzymes responsible for metabolism of drugs and other xenobiotics in humans. His discovery of the poor metaboliser phenotype for tolbutamide, and the demonstration that this results from an allelic variation in a cytochrome P450 enzyme, was a seminal contribution in pharmacogenomics.

Professor Miners has led the development of approaches for studying individual differences in drug metabolism, and drug-drug interactions, using in vitro metabolism models. He has led efforts to extrapolate in vitro drug metabolism data to predict pharmacokinetics of drugs in vivo. His approaches have been widely adopted internationally and play an important role in drug development in the pharmaceutical industry. 

Professor Keith Worsley, Professor of Statistics, University of Chicago, USA

Professor Worsley is one of the world’s leading statisticians. Over the last 20 or so years, he has made very significant contributions both to statistical theory and its applications, most importantly in the field of human brain mapping. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and received the Gold Medal of the Statistical Society of Canada in 2004.  Keith Worsley graduated from the University of Auckland with a BSc (1972), MSc (1973) and PhD (1978).

Professor Worsley’s main research is concerned with smooth random fields which, for example, serve as models for the data collected by neuroscientists using Positron Emission Tomography or Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging. His work has focused on inferential questions to determine which areas of the human brain are active while subjects perform a given task.

Professor Worsley’s approach to these questions is a unique mix of probability theory, statistics and geometry. In his work on the maxima of smooth random fields, he uncovered elegant connections between smooth random fields and classical integral geometry.

In addition to his work on random fields, Professor Worsley has made important contributions to a number of other areas of statistics, including multiple testing and change point problems.