Search James Cook Fellowship awards 1996–2017

Public Summary: Migraine is one of the most prevalent neurological disorders, affecting 10-20% of adults. It places a substantial burden on individuals, families and society (e.g. through lost work), and is cited by the World Health Organisation as a priority for finding more effective treatments. Some patients are able to manage their migraines by avoiding their triggers, using the “triptan” class of medication, or with non-specific pain treatments, such as paracetamol and ibuprofen. Unfortunately, these drugs do not work for all patients and many sufferers, especially those who suffer from chronic migraine, typified by 15 migraine days per month have no effective treatment.
Recent clinical trials for a new drug that targets the neurotransmitter Calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP), a principal factor in migraine pain transmission, have demonstrated great promise in reducing migraine symptoms. There is no doubt that the CGRP-based medicines that are in trials are a tremendous advance but there are still some major unresolved questions; will these drugs be safe in the long term and why do some patients respond extremely well in clinical trials but others do not?
Interestingly, Professor Hay and her team recently made the discovery that CGRP may induce pain through more than one pathway, a discovery that is in contrast to common belief. This discovery opens up the possibility of developing safer and more effective migraine drugs targeting this pain pathway. With this Fellowship, she will work with International headache experts from both academia and the pharmaceutical industry to further improve the safety and efficacy of this type of drug to improve treatments for migraine patients. She will also advance closer links with New Zealand neurologists and develop public lectures, to better understand the needs of patients with headache disorders.

Public Summary: Working in close collaboration with a number of experimental groups around the world, I shall construct mathematical and computational models of airway smooth muscle cells, and thence try to understand the mechanisms underlying the excessive contractile responses that occur during asthma. These models will require the development of new mathematical methods for handling multiple spatial and temporal scales, and will be used to inform and direct further experimental investigations.

Public Summary: The deregulation of the electricity industry will change the pattern of power generation and transmission. The high cost of new transmission lines and growing difficulties in getting resource consents will encourage the use of the existing transmission system further (closer to the stability limits), by means of fast power electronic control. Moreover, the use of alternative generation, consisting of smaller distributed units closer to the point of consumption, will avoid further reinforcements of the primary transmission system. The points of interconnection, however, will require complex interfaces under power electronic control.
The tools available to simulate the performance of power systems under power electronic control are far from satisfactory and it is the purpose of this project to create software for the design of such systems. This will benefit the New Zealand economy by reducing the costs of future generation and transmission and will have environmental benefits for the community.

Public Summary: Nano-structured materials have superior electronic and physical properties, which have the potential to change our modem society. They are regarded as one of the most promising technologies in the 21st century. Devices using nano-materials or films are often faster, smaller and more efficient. We have developed a new concept, using the oxidation of metals to produce oxide films with controlled structure and porosity. Nano-structured oxides are grown on a substrate, and consequently have much better stability, This project will focus on transition metal oxide thin films with special photonic and electronic properties for optoelectronic device applications. The outcomes of this research will be new techniques to produce nano-films with controlled porosity and properties, This research will also provide important skills, know-how and trained personnel for New Zealand, who will be able to apply these materials in industrial applications.

Public Summary: Annually in New Zealand, more than 500 premature infants survive weighing less than 1,500 grams. Research shows that these infants are at high risk for a range of neurodevelopmental problems, including cerebral palsy, learning difficulties, Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, conduct problems and poor school achievement. A longitudinal study of 106 premature born children and 106 comparison children born in Canterbury has been examining the nature and neurological causes of these problems. Findings to date reveal early abnormalities within the developing white matter (cabling networks) of the brain, with these abnormalities being highly prognostic of neurodevelopmental outcome. The goal of this next study wave is to understand the effects of these early abnormalities on actual brain development and function using MRI methods. Of particular interest is the extent to which opportunities may exist for compensatory change or repair in the developing brain and the factors that may assist or hinder children’s neurological and neurodevelopmental progress.

Public Summary: We have recently discovered that the interaction between silver atoms and simple organic molecules that contain carbon-carbon double bonds can be used to construct both discrete and polymeric assemblies. We now propose to exploit this discovery by designing and synthesising a range of organic molecules that will lead to the rational design of a diverse array of molecular architectures based on this interaction. We will also search for other related interactions that might be useful for the preparation of new chemical assemblies with applications in such diverse areas as material science, separation technologies, catalysis and nanotechnology.

Public Summary: The ability to provide rigorous, flexible and realistic ecological information that can underpin ecosystem-based management, risk-assessment, environmental decision-making and policy, both within New Zealand and internationally, is urgently required. However, current statistical models of ecological communities do not adequately allow for the simultaneous integration of a number of important features that are unique to multi-species datasets. For example, most species do not act independently of one another, they often occur together in large aggregations, co-existing or competing in different ways across multiple environmental niches. At the same time, within a given sampled habitat, many species that might occur there are either not detected or are very rare; also, each ecological dataset often has more species than sampling units – a condition termed high-dimensionality. The time is now ripe for significant new advances to be made, as the necessary computational apparatus required for flexible multivariate modelling of such data is now achievable.
Professor Anderson aims to build and explore the use of novel multivariate distributions for modelling ecological communities. She will ground-truth the utility of these approaches alongside other techniques, including Bayesian methods, for modelling ecological community data in real settings. The ultimate goal will be to develop new rigorous models and associated new user-friendly software that will be straightforward for ecologists to implement for real data, allowing estimation, simulation, assessment of power for multivariate hypothesis-testing procedures and, importantly, prediction. Such tools will also allow quantification of species richness and turnover in composition. Professor Anderson hopes that her research will significantly advance the field of quantitative ecology, allowing scientists to develop new insights into the biodiversity of any ecological system at any scale.

Public Summary: The COMPASS research centre has constructed a system in which data from existing long term studies have been combined into a dynamic and realistic, but artificial, working model of the early childhood years in New Zealand. The plan is to extend this working model and adapt it, by linking to census data. By calibrating the simulations with series over the entire life span using unlinked census data, they will be able to test the model, and see how well it can model populations over the entire life span, and how populations have evolved since 1981. The result will be the ability to use existing data to create a dynamic representation of New Zealand society in which virtual experiments on matters of policy and substantive interest can be conducted: the “social laboratory” of the proposal’s title. By the end of the two-year fellowship period the aim is to have an inquiry system operational that spans the life course, that articulates with census data – both linked and unlinked – that is able to incorporate and interrogate significant issues of policy, scientific and public interest, that has several worked examples of these, and that has a range of partners in a working “collaboratory”.

Public Summary: New Zealand is now known around the world for its leading contribution to a particular category of Magnetic Resonance involving the measurement of molecular motion. This project will help to maintain our leadership by advancing research undertaken in New Zealand, and by producing what is hoped to be the definitive research monograph on this subject. A further benefit will arise from a strengthening of the publicly-funded research platform underpinning New Zealand’s first NMR export company, magritek.

Public Summary: This proposal centers around two fundamental areas of mathematics which have recently undergone enormous growth due to a new understanding of their importance and a plethora of innovative ideas which have had far reaching and decisive applications.
These areas are low-dimensional topology and geometry and nonlinear analysis. The former is concerned with the geometric properties of 2,3&4-dimensional spaces, the latter with properties of solutions to nonlinear Partial Differential Equations (PDEs)
This proposal will enhance our knowledge of both of these areas. First by classifying certain arithmetic Kleinian groups using important new discoveries in number theory, 3-dimensional topology and hyperbolic geometry and contributing to the program to identify certain extremal hyperbolic objects (minimal volume etc). The second by advancing the program established by us to determine the regularity properties of solutions to certain nonlinear PDEs. The latter having diverse applications in nonlinear elasticity (the mathematical modeling of deformations of objects) and complex dynamical systems.