Explore as a

Search Marsden awards 2008–2017

Search awarded Marsden Fund grants 2008–2017

Fund Type: Marsden Fund

Category: Fast-Start

Year Awarded: 2014

Title: The causes and consequences of multidimensional individual specialisation in freshwater fish

Recipient(s): Dr T Ingram | PI | University of Otago
Dr MS Araujo | AI | Universidade Estadual Paulista

Public Summary: Every individual in a population is unique, and differences in resource use among individuals can have important consequences for ecosystems. Ecological niches encompass numerous resources such as diet and habitat, but we know little about how individuals differ in multiple ecological dimensions. We will use emerging methods to measure individual resource use in New Zealand freshwater fish, and to calculate the extent and dimensionality of niche variation. We will focus on interactions between native common bullies and introduced perch in wetland ponds. We will ask whether niche variation in bullies responds to the introduction of perch, and how the effect of perch compares to other habitat characteristics. We will then test whether knowing the ecological dimensions in which individuals are most variable is important for predicting how a population’s resource use will shift in response to environmental change. Finally, we will ask whether the effect that a population has on its ecosystem depends on whether individuals use similar resources or differ in one or in multiple ecological dimensions. We predict that knowing the dimensions of variation among individuals will be essential for understanding how species interact with their environments.

Total Awarded: $300,000

Duration: 3

Host: University of Otago

Contact Person: Dr T Ingram

Panel: EEB

Project ID: 14-UOO-062


Fund Type: Marsden Fund

Category: Fast-Start

Year Awarded: 2012

Title: The colour of crime: investigation of attitudes towards blue- and white-collar offending

Recipient(s): Dr LJ Marriott | PI | Victoria University of Wellington

Public Summary: Do the Australasian judicial systems treat all people equally? A pilot study undertaken by the PI indicates that in New Zealand prosecuted white-collar crime is treated more leniently by the judicial system than financially equivalent blue-collar crime. International research indicates that this practice is well established. Are these different sentencing practices justified? This study will quantify the differences in penalties awarded to white- and blue-collar offences in New Zealand and Australia, by examining offending and sentencing of tax evasion and benefit fraud in each country. Interviews with senior members of the legal profession, interviews with offenders, and survey data will be used to capture attitudes towards these crimes and punishments. The empirical data will be used, in conjunction with theories of punishment, to offer an explanatory model of punishment that incorporates society’s attitudes to offending. The study will then examine the model in relation to different normative theories of justice. This provides the opportunity to encourage critical reflection on potential injustices in the justice system.

Total Awarded: $300,000

Duration: 3

Host: Victoria University of Wellington

Contact Person: Dr LJ Marriott

Panel: SOC

Project ID: 12-VUW-058


Fund Type: Marsden Fund

Category: Standard

Year Awarded: 2017

Title: The Combinatorics of Reticulate Evolution

Recipient(s): Professor CA Semple | PI | University of Canterbury
Professor MA Steel | PI | University of Canterbury
Dr MJR Bordewich | AI | University of Durham
Professor A Lambert | AI | UPMC University of Paris 06

Public Summary: Darwin viewed evolution as a treelike process. However, non-treelike (reticulate) processes such as hybridisation and lateral gene transfer mean that evolution is a much more complicated and perplexing process. Indeed, some of the most difficult questions in biology concern unravelling the ancestral relationships of species that have undergone reticulate evolution. This project will develop and apply new mathematical, statistical, and computational techniques to study the combinatorial properties of evolution under random processes of reticulation. We will focus on three key mathematical questions. Answers to these are central to understanding how reticulation in evolution may have obscured ancestral relationships in the past, based on what we can observe today, and the extent to which a tangled network can be viewed as having an underlying treelike structure.

Total Awarded: $665,000

Duration: 3

Host: University of Canterbury

Contact Person: Professor CA Semple

Panel: MIS

Project ID: 17-UOC-015


Fund Type: Marsden Fund

Category: Standard

Year Awarded: 2010

Title: The conformal geometry of submanifolds and natural PDE

Recipient(s): Prof AR Gover | PI | The University of Auckland
Assoc Prof A Cap | AI | Universität Wien
Prof MG Eastwood | AI | Australian National University

Public Summary: A huge array of fundamental mathematical, physical, and biological systems are governed by natural partial differential equations (PDE); these are equations whose coefficients are geometrically determined by the underlying structure on which they are defined. A particularly revealing technique for studying such equations arises from exploring their properties under a local change of scale, a so-called conformal transformation. Indeed advances in conformal geometry, and its generalisations, have opened the way for exciting new approaches to treating such equations. A central aim of this proposal is to develop these new ideas into a theory that is both conceptually powerful and calculationally effective; this will be applied to hard problems of geometric and physical significance. A special focus is the discovery of new geometric results for structures generalising surfaces, called submanifolds.

Strong connections with top international research groups will be extended to bring world leading researchers to New Zealand. The country will gain cutting edge knowledge and techniques, as well as enhanced graduate training.

Total Awarded: $391,304

Duration: 3

Host: The University of Auckland

Contact Person: Prof AR Gover

Panel: MIS

Project ID: 10-UOA-113


Fund Type: Marsden Fund

Category: Standard

Year Awarded: 2013

Title: The Crown: perspectives on a contested symbol and its constitutional significance in New Zealand and the Commonwealth

Recipient(s): Professor CN Shore | PI | The University of Auckland
Professor DV Williams | AI | The University of Auckland

Public Summary: Since 1840 the Crown has stood at the heart of New Zealand’s constitutional order, and in the Treaty, as the embodiment of state authority. Yet the Crown itself remains enigmatic and poorly understood. While legal scholars acknowledge it is a ‘contested concept’ and ‘useful fiction’ whose meanings ‘differ according to context’, there is no comprehensive account of how it is contested or understood, or the implications of its shifting and contradictory meanings. How does the Crown represent itself? For whom is it useful and how? What does the Crown reveal about the evolution of the state in New Zealand and other settler societies? How do policy-makers use the Crown as a strategic and symbolic resource? This innovative study will combine ethnographic and comparative techniques, anthropological and legal approaches, and post-colonial theories of governance, power and statehood to address these questions. The multi-disciplinary team – an anthropologist, legal expert and two social science MA students – will use comparative, ethnographic and case-study approaches to generate fresh insights into the transformation of the state in post-colonial societies. The results will lead to new understandings of the Crown as a socio-political institution and cultural entity at a time when constitutional re-ordering is imminent.

Total Awarded: $604,348

Duration: 3

Host: The University of Auckland

Contact Person: Professor CN Shore

Panel: SOC

Project ID: 13-UOA-205


Fund Type: Marsden Fund

Category: Standard

Year Awarded: 2011

Title: The cultural evolution of religion

Recipient(s): Prof RD Gray | PI | The University of Auckland
Dr SJ Greenhill | PI | The University of Auckland
Dr JA Bulbulia | AI | Victoria University of Wellington

Public Summary: Humans are the religious species: every society has some form of religious belief. A major challenge for evolutionary theory is therefore to explain the prevalence of religious beliefs. The ubiquity of religion suggests that it must play an essential functional role in human societies. This project will test three functional explanations for religious beliefs using the quantitative phylogenetic methods routinely used to test adaptive explanations in evolutionary biology: do high gods evolve in complex societies, does ecology constrain religion, and are religious texts functionally constrained? The answers will make a major contribution to the exciting new field of science - evolutionary religious studies.

Total Awarded: $673,913

Duration: 3

Host: The University of Auckland

Contact Person: Prof RD Gray

Panel: EEB

Project ID: 11-UOA-239


Fund Type: Marsden Fund

Category: Fast-Start

Year Awarded: 2016

Title: The dating game of loanwords: linguistic and sociolinguistic characteristics influencing loanword usage

Recipient(s): Dr AS Calude | PI | University of Waikato

Public Summary: New Zealand English is emerging as a new dialect of English, distinct from its British English roots and divergent from its most closely related cousin, Australian English. One of the most salient features of New Zealand English is the increase in words of Maori origin. The use of Maori borrowings (loanwords) is not homogeneous, with some loanwords enjoying greater ‘success’ compared to others. I propose empirical models to study the mechanisms for how Maori loanwords spread into New Zealand English. I will investigate relative loanword success by examining data from private, spoken interactions and public, highly edited discourse, taking into consideration linguistic factors (for example, word category and word meanings), socio-linguistic factors (the speaker’s gender, ethnicity and age), and priming factors (loanword co-occurrence in the same interaction). Additionally, I will document processes of “attraction” among loanwords; that is, the extent to which the use of one loanword acts as a trigger for the use of others, recognizing “hub” loanwords whose usage strongly predicts subsequent loanword occurrences. The borrowing of words is usually considered to have little contribution to linguistic theory, but my preliminary research shows that understanding the mechanisms of borrowings will provide novel insights into how languages evolve.

Total Awarded: $300,000

Duration: 3

Host: University of Waikato

Contact Person: Dr AS Calude

Panel: HUM

Project ID: 16-UOW-015


Fund Type: Marsden Fund

Category: Standard

Year Awarded: 2011

Title: The determination of protein structure by racemic protein crystallography

Recipient(s): Prof MA Brimble | PI | The University of Auckland
Prof EN Baker | PI | The University of Auckland
Dr PWH Harris | AI | The University of Auckland
Prof SB Kent | AI | The University of Chicago
Dr C Squire | AI | The University of Auckland

Public Summary: Protein crystallography has profoundly enhanced understanding of biological mechanisms, but suffers from limitations in protein production and crystallization. We will implement a radically new approach, racemic protein crystallography, in which racemic mixtures of D- and L-proteins, prepared by total chemical synthesis, are crystallized. This will overcome protein production problems and expand crystallization space. We will target proteins from Orf, an animal poxvirus that produces a remarkable array of proteins involved in infection or viral survival. Conventional approaches have failed on these proteins. We hypothesize that racemic crystallography will prove a very powerful approach for these and other previously intractable proteins.

Total Awarded: $717,391

Duration: 3

Host: The University of Auckland

Contact Person: Prof MA Brimble

Panel: PCB

Project ID: 11-UOA-100


Fund Type: Marsden Fund

Category: Fast-Start

Year Awarded: 2010

Title: The development of computational procedures and numerical tables in Sanskrit mathematics in the second millennium

Recipient(s): Dr CJ Montelle | PI | University of Canterbury
Dr KL Plofker | AI | Union College

Public Summary: Numerical tables, a significant yet often overlooked source in the history of mathematics, not only hold intrinsic mathematical interest with respect to the computational techniques they embody, but also more broadly as they speak to scientific practices, assumptions, and aspirations of those that compiled them. Typically the result of massive computational enterprise, tables are a testament to the practical achievements of the society that produced them as well as the cultural and social contexts that define it. However the significance of mathematical tables and computational techniques often goes unnoticed, due largely to their subordinate role in classical and modern mathematics. Neglect of these subjects in the history of mathematics has led to a widespread failure to understand the role of computational practices in shaping scientific ideas. The proposed study undertakes to remedy this situation by an in-depth investigation of tables and computation algorithms in the mathematics of India in the second millennium, documenting and analyzing the growing importance and eventual dominance of computational mathematics in the Sanskrit exact sciences.

Total Awarded: $240,000

Duration: 3

Host: University of Canterbury

Contact Person: Dr CJ Montelle

Panel: HUM

Project ID: 10-UOC-108


Fund Type: Marsden Fund

Category: Fast-Start

Year Awarded: 2011

Title: The development of Trojan liposomes to target dysfunctional macrophages

Recipient(s): Dr BL Stocker | PI | Malaghan Institute of Medical Research
Prof G Le Gros | AI | Malaghan Institute of Medical Research

Public Summary: Macrophages have an important role in protecting our body against pathogens, however, at times they can become ‘dysfunctional’ and have a deleterious role in disease progression. In view of this, much effort has been spent in developing macrophage-depletion strategies with evidence supporting the theory that macrophage-depletion has beneficial effects in the treatment of diseases such as cancer, arthritis and atherosclerosis. The typical strategy to deplete macrophages involves the encapsulation of a macrophage-depleting drug (e.g. clodronate) inside a delivery vehicle (e.g. a liposome) that the phagocytic macrophage then engulfs. The challenge to develop better and more specific macrophage depletion strategies, however, still remains.

To develop improved macrophage-depletion strategies, we will exploit the recently identified macrophage inducible C-type lectin (‘Mincle’). Mincle is expressed on macrophages and was recently shown to be a receptor for the M. tuberculosis glycolipids trehalose dimycolates (TDMs). By generating liposomes coated with the Mincle ligand, TDM, this will provide a means by which to specifically target and thus better deplete the ‘dysfunctional’ macrophage.

Total Awarded: $300,000

Duration: 3

Host: Malaghan Institute of Medical Research

Contact Person: Dr BL Stocker

Panel: BMS

Project ID: 11-MIM-005


Share our content