Search Marsden awards 2008–2017

Recipient(s): Professor SC Carr | PI | Massey University Auckland
Dr S Alefaio-Tugia | PI | Massey University Auckland
Professor J Arrowsmith | PI | Massey University Auckland
Professor JM Haar | PI | Auckland University of Technology
Professor DJ Hodgetts | PI | Massey University Auckland
Professor J Parker | PI | Massey University Auckland

Public Summary: If employment is a solution to poverty, and prosperity includes quality of living, then earning a living wage is pivotal. But what is a living wage, what freedoms and qualities of (work) life can it enable? Living wages are widely touted as empowering individuals and households, providing a pathway from poverty to work-life satisfaction and greater shared prosperity. Yet living wage debates themselves remain shrouded in material, pecuniary concerns, from the cost of shopping baskets to the hourly pay rate that buys them.

Our approach differs because we explore a wage spectrum; diverse perspectives of employers and employees; and use research techniques that will deliver findings of breadth and depth over time. First, with livelihoods positioned across a wage spectrum, we examine when, how and by what means lives can be enhanced, using surveys anchored in lower-income communities. Second, we explore wage-setting and its impact on the organisational functioning and livelihood-quality of life nexus, using organisational case studies. Third, we investigate decision-making around the wage spectrum with employers, using focus groups. Throughout, we draw insights from, and engage with, a purpose-built global living wage network (https://youtu.be/zbZafHgqumo). This project will inform public deliberations on living wages in an age of societal and organisational transformation.

Recipient(s): Professor JM Tylianakis | PI | University of Canterbury
Professor GLW Perry | AI | The University of Auckland
Associate Professor DP Vazquez | AI | Nat Scientific & Technical Research Cncl-CONICET

Public Summary: All species depend on interactions with others for their survival. These interactions can be seen as a complex network, the architecture of which is important for maintaining functioning ecosystems. Currently, we cannot predict how these networks of interactions will change under future conditions, because it is unclear when the characteristics of species (‘niche’ processes) or their probability of encountering one another at random (‘neutral’ processes) determines the occurrence of interactions. This project will study networks of interactions among plants and their pollinators and seed dispersers to understand the situations under which niche vs. neutral processes are most important. In particular, we will test whether exotic species and species that interact with many others choose their interaction partners less on the basis of their traits, and more based on their abundance. Then we will test whether the importance of niche vs. neutral processes is constant in time and space, and along environmental gradients. Finally, we will use these findings to model how changing importance of niche vs. neutral processes influences the vulnerability of interaction networks to invasions by exotic species, and the survival of native species.

Recipient(s): Professor SJS Cranefield | PI | University of Otago
Professor JV Pitt | AI | Imperial College London

Public Summary: This project will apply computational modelling and simulation to investigate the problem of collective action: explaining how self-interested parties can be motivated to coordinate their action to achieve a common benefit. Problems of this sort include management of a common resource pool (such as a river or a fishery) and collectively reducing carbon emissions. Mathematical models from game theory predict that free-riding behaviour will dominate and cause the collective action to fail. However, a range of social factors, such as the existence of norms, a desire to earn 'social capital', and leadership mechanisms have been proposed to explain why collective action will often succeed in practice.

This project uses a computational approach to gain new understanding of the social reasoning underlying collective action problems. We will develop a computational model describing how individuals decide how to act based on personal and social goals and rewards, in combination with social incentives and group coordination mechanisms. Through simulations of various scenarios we will investigate which social factors have the most impact on achieving collective action.

The techniques developed will have the potential for use in building software to advise and assist people to coordinate their actions and achieve collective goals.

Recipient(s): Dr CR McGann | PI | University of Canterbury
Professor P Arduino | AI | University of Washington
Professor BA Bradley | AI | University of Canterbury
Dr J Kaklamanos | AI | Merrimack College

Public Summary: Current state-of-the-art analytical techniques for site-specific seismic response analysis are largely based on 1D wave propagation assumptions, while the growing body of evidence raises questions about the validity of this approach. This project will develop and validate a hybrid 3D site response analysis framework that considers 3D soil heterogeneity, 3D input ground motions, and multidimensional nonlinear soil constitutive models using data from over 5000 observations at over 100 vertical array sites in Japan. This extensively validated modeling framework will enable a critical examination of the limitations of 1D analysis, provide important insights into residual ground motion prediction uncertainty, and establish a framework for a paradigm shift away from the current 1D approach to seismic site response analysis.

Recipient(s): Dr EA Elinoff | PI | Victoria University of Wellington

Public Summary: What can something as mundane as concrete tell us about the environmental politics of the Anthropocene? Accounting for over five per cent of global carbon emissions, concrete is a ubiquitous, but often overlooked, material in contemporary environmental debates. This research develops a multi-sited, multi-scalar ethnographic approach to studying both the situated and planetary effects of the concrete industry. Focussing on Thailand, a critical site for cement production in Southeast Asia (one of the world’s fastest urbanizing regions), this project investigates the social, technical, environmental, and political processes that give urban environments their shape. Following the concrete from quarries, to engineering laboratories, to urban infrastructure projects, to the living rooms of urban citizens, it aims to understand the role the material plays in our contemporary environmental moment. Within these settings, this study explores how concrete’s situated material effects intertwine with socio-political processes to produce trajectories of environmental change and opportunities for environmental contestation. Although there has been a proliferation of theoretical discussions of the Anthropocene across the social sciences, this research addresses both the conceptual question of how social and political processes aggregate within the environment and develops methodological tools to better understand urban ecologies in a moment of planetary transformation.

Recipient(s): Dr HL Fitzsimons | PI | Massey University Manawatu
Dr D Wheeler | AI | Massey University Manawatu

Public Summary: Impaired function of the histone deacetylase HDAC4 has been found in several neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative disorders that are associated with cognitive impairments, and we have recently shown that HDAC4 plays a critical role in both long-term memory formation and neuronal development in Drosophila. HDACs are classically known to act in the nucleus of the cell to regulate gene expression; however HDAC4 is predominantly non-nuclear in neurons. Despite this, investigation of the non-nuclear functions of HDAC4 has been largely overlooked. In a recent breakthrough, we discovered that HDAC4 interacts genetically with a cluster of genes that regulate the actin cytoskeleton, a structure that allows a cell to grow and move. This is an exciting finding given that both memory formation and neuronal morphogenesis are dependent on remodeling of the actin cytoskeleton. Here, we propose to investigate the nuclear and non-nuclear roles of HDAC4 in memory and neuronal morphogenesis by investigating the mechanisms through which it interacts with cytoskeletal regulators that modulate these processes. Our Drosophila model is extremely powerful for neuroscientific discovery as it provides the ability to combine genetic, biochemical and behavioural analyses in the same in vivo system and thus is ideally suited to gaining insights into HDAC4 function.

Recipient(s): Associate Professor LK Cheng | PI | The University of Auckland
Dr P Du | AI | The University of Auckland
Associate Professor G O'Grady | AI | The University of Auckland

Public Summary: The gut is constantly on the move! It moves to break-down and mix ingested food, helping to absorb nutrients and eliminate waste. The movements of the gut are 'powered' by a bioelectrical activity that is generated by inter-connected networks of pacemaker cells distributed throughout the gut. This proposal seeks to develop an experimental-theoretical framework that will provide new insights into the relationship between gut tissue structure, bioelectrical activity and resultant movements. A series of unique sensors and imaging techniques will be developed and applied. These novel structural-functional data will be integrated using mathematical modelling and quantitative analysis techniques to produce an atlas of gut bioelectrical functions.

Recipient(s): Associate Professor T Dare | PI | University of Auckland
Dr BP Smith | AI | Lakes District Health Board
Professor R Vaithianathan | AI | AUT University

Public Summary: We are in the midst of a practical and intellectual revolution. Predictive analytics - the accumulation of vast bodies of searchable electronic data and accompanying development of sophisticated processing and analytical capacity - allows us to accurately assess the probability that a child will be maltreated, a released prisoner will reoffend, a discharged patient will be readmitted, how a court will decide a case, how a student will do at university. Predictive analytics will touch every aspect of our lives. This project focuses on social policy applications. While predictive analytics promises significant benefits in those contexts, it also poses significant ethical challenges. Our capacity to identify patterns and predict outcomes has outpaced our understanding of accompanying ethical risks and how they might be addressed. These challenges are not merely hypothetical. Policy makers and others face them right now, and, inevitably, they will persist and grow. Predictive analytics is so powerful and so accessible that it will be used, ethical concerns notwithstanding. We urgently need an ethic for use of predictive analytics in social policy contexts, and that it what this project aims to provide.

Recipient(s): Dr RE Campbell | PI | University of Otago

Public Summary: Female androgen excess is a distressing issue for a large number of women suffering from polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS). Our current knowledge of androgen signalling in females is sorely lacking and very little is understood about the potentially critical role that androgen actions have in the female brain. This study will employ new transgenic model approaches and the latest generation of clinically relevant drug therapies to dissect out specific androgen actions in the brain and body throughout female development. We are proposing here to silence androgen signalling in specific developmental windows and in specific tissues and cell types to assess the role of androgen actions in both normal fertility and in states of female androgen excess such as PCOS. The outcomes of this proposed series of experiments will ultimately provide valuable new knowledge on the forefront of basic research aimed at understanding PCOS and steroid hormone signalling in the female brain.

Recipient(s): Professor SR Marsland | PI | Massey University Manawatu
Associate Professor IC Castro | AI | Massey University Manawatu

Public Summary: New Zealand has amazing birdlife: nocturnal parrots, birds that can't fly, and birds that turn up after 50 years of being thought extinct. Unfortunately, many native species require wildlife management programmes, and they are hard to monitor: they are often well-camouflaged or nocturnal. How can you discern what works in wildlife management if you don't know how many animals there are and how the number changes?

Most birds make sound, and so there is a real need for a system that can detect, recognise, analyse, and infer bird populations using automated sound recorders. However, data from these recorders is noisy and extremely variable in factors such as volume. In this project we will work to reliably detect and recognise birdsong from these recordings, and estimate the abundance of birds from the number of calls, by developing mathematical and computational tools to analyse sound, and combining them with ecological experiments to understand how calls relate to population estimates. This inter-disciplinary project will combine fundamental and practical work in theoretical and experimental science to develop sound solutions in both areas. Our work will be made publicly available through our AviaNZ software platform, which is already used by conservation groups across the country.