Search Marsden awards 2008–2017
Search awarded Marsden Fund grants 2008–2017
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Fast-Start
Year Awarded: 2017
Title: The small scales call the shots: the effect of microinstabilities on collisionless cosmic fluids
Recipient(s): Dr J Squire | PI | California Institute of Technology
Professor E Quataert | AI | University of California at Berkeley
Public Summary: Virtually all of the ordinary matter in the universe is plasma: a fluid that is so diffuse that its ions and electrons cannot recombine into atoms. Very hot and diffuse plasmas, which have weak magnetic fields and infrequent interparticle collisions, are hypersensitive: with any tiny change in the magnetic field, microinstabilities abruptly grow and violently mix the plasma. Despite being enormously smaller in scale than the motions that caused them in the first place, these microinstabilities strongly influence the plasma's macroscale dynamics. We will quantify these effects by developing a new theory for the fluid dynamics (large-scale behaviour) of plasmas under these conditions. This theory will quantify the evolution of microinstabilities, and how they affect the macroscale plasma motions and magnetic fields. Our work will critically improve our fundamental knowledge of this exotic (but widespread) form of matter, will lay the foundation for understanding its turbulent dynamics, and will yield the first practical techniques for simulating such plasmas. These in turn will be crucial for unravelling key astrophysical processes such as galaxy formation, the interaction of the Earth with the sun, and the magnetisation of the universe itself.
Total Awarded: $300,000
Duration: 3
Host: California Institute of Technology
Contact Person: Dr J Squire
Panel: PCB
Project ID: 17-UOO-209
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Standard
Year Awarded: 2013
Title: The social consequences of spirituality and religion: a twenty year longitudinal study
Recipient(s): Dr JB Bulbulia | PI | Victoria University of Wellington
Public Summary: The New Zealand Attitudes and Values Study was launched in 2009 to investigate stability and change in values across New Zealand for twenty years. This project will build on, and extend, existing NZAVS infrastructure to enable the world's first dedicated national longitudinal investigation of religion, spirituality, and values. Specifically, we will enlarge the NZAVS community sample to include a fair representation of new migrant groups, bolster qualitative and quantitative data acquisition to document a richer story of New Zealand religion and spirituality, create a new longitudinal sample in Christchurch to address how spirituality affects disaster recovery, and strengthen collaborative relationships between humanities scholars and social scientists across New Zealand. The project will run in parallel with the NZAVS, and will directly involve communities at a grass-roots level. Results are important because researchers currently know very little about how religion and spirituality is changing over time, and how these changes are reciprocally affecting basic values, life satisfaction, education, employment, and health. This project will address these questions, creating knowledge with enduring benefits for future generations of New Zealanders.
Total Awarded: $769,565
Duration: 3
Host: Victoria University of Wellington
Contact Person: Dr JB Bulbulia
Panel: SOC
Project ID: 13-VUW-203
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Fast-Start
Year Awarded: 2017
Title: The solution to the Southern Ocean's sea ice mystery - its thickness
Recipient(s): Dr DDF Price | PI | University of Canterbury
Professor C Haas | AI | Alfred Wegener Institute
Dr NT Kurtz | AI | NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre
Public Summary: At maximum seasonal extent, Antarctic sea ice covers an area two and a half times the size of Australia. Its formation drives oceanic circulation; its drift and melt patterns transport billions of tonnes of freshwater annually; and its reflective surface completely alters the surface energy balance of the Southern Ocean. Yet many questions remain about this key component of the climate system, largely stemming from the fact we have been unable to monitor its thickness. This research will use a multi-sensor statistical analysis of regionally-varying snow and ice types to decrease uncertainty in measurement of thickness from satellites. After validating the output using airborne and surface campaigns we will be able to combine data from sequential satellite missions producing a two decade evaluation of the sea ice thickness distribution. With mass balance quantified, a holistic interpretation of the state of the Antarctic sea ice cover will be possible, with accurate estimates of brine and freshwater input to the Southern Ocean. This will deliver a crucial data set to the wider community to forecast future change in this fundamental part of the climate system.
Total Awarded: $300,000
Duration: 3
Host: University of Canterbury
Contact Person: Dr DDF Price
Panel: ESA
Project ID: 17-UOC-103
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Standard
Year Awarded: 2013
Title: The strategies by which miniature predators use highly structured working memory
Recipient(s): Professor RR Jackson | PI | University of Canterbury
Public Summary: Small animals may have small brains, but they can tell us big things about animal cognition. Our small animals of choice are salticid spiders, and we will use Portia, a genus known to prefer other spiders as prey, to investigate specialised use of working memory. ‘Working memory’ refers to the mechanisms by which priority information is made immediately accessible to other cognitive processes, including reasoning and making plans. Our proposed research will be based on using Portia-specific methods to detect instances of expectancy violation for different spider prey. This will be an important step toward determining the role of specialised working memory in supporting complex behaviour by small predators. However, as Portia will receive no prior training and have no prior encounters with the prey we use in experiments, our research will reveal innate prey-type representations. We will also investigate this predator’s specialised reliance on innate, numerical cognition. Even for people, working memory is known to be subject to strong capacity limitations. By focusing on a small predator (a spider) that preys on other predators (other spiders), our broader goal is to understand how highly structured innate working memory can compensate for small-brain capacity limitations.
Total Awarded: $826,087
Duration: 3
Host: University of Canterbury
Contact Person: Professor RR Jackson
Panel: EEB
Project ID: 13-UOC-038
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Fast-Start
Year Awarded: 2017
Title: The straw that didn’t break the camel’s back: what variations in stressing-rate can faults withstand?
Recipient(s): Dr CJ Chamberlain | PI | Institue of Geophysics
Dr AM Thomas | AI | University of Oregon
Professor J Townend | AI | Victoria University of Wellington
Public Summary: Theoretical and experimental analyses of earthquake physics indicate that the rate of tectonic stressing of faults is a key control on when and how earthquakes start. Recent observations of increased slip-rates (and hence increased stressing-rates) prior to large earthquakes provide tantalising examples of this in nature. However, it is not clear why some increases in slip-rate trigger earthquakes while others do not. In this study, we will use modern computational methods and supercomputing facilities to scour a decade’s continuous seismic data for repeating earthquakes occurring on and near New Zealand’s plate-boundary faults. Using this catalogue of repeating earthquakes, we will calculate slip-rates and stressing-rates for faults that have not recently failed in large earthquakes. To better understand the interplay of small earthquakes with large, locked patches of faults, we will construct computer models of fault loading and earthquake nucleation that incorporate modern theories of earthquake physics and physical parameters derived from our observations.
Total Awarded: $300,000
Duration: 3
Host: Institue of Geophysics
Contact Person: Dr CJ Chamberlain
Panel: ESA
Project ID: 17-VUW-121
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Standard
Year Awarded: 2017
Title: The Stuff Memories Are Made Of: How Bacteria Remember and Learn from Environmental Signals
Recipient(s): Dr OK Silander | PI | Massey University Auckland
Dr F Jug | AI | Max Plank Institute of Mol & Cell Biol & Genetics
Associate Professor E Kussell | AI | New York University
Public Summary: Bacterial growth rates and death rates depend critically on the way that they respond to changes in environmental conditions. For example, they may employ different stress responses to survive antibiotic treatment. Similar to many other organisms, previous environmental conditions can affect how bacteria behave in the future. This phenomenon is commonly referred to as memory: when previous experiences affect future behaviour. However, in bacteria, the effects and mechanisms of memory are not well understood. Here we propose quantitatively measuring the effects of bacterial memory on growth and survival, using a wide range of approaches to understand when memories are formed, and what affects the length of time they are maintained. In many cases, we expect that memories are mediated by epigenetic modifications to DNA. We will use cutting-edge techniques to quantify such modifications on a genome-wide level in single cells. Together, this work will give us novel insight into the effects and mechanisms of memory in bacterial cells
Total Awarded: $895,000
Duration: 3
Host: Massey University Auckland
Contact Person: Dr OK Silander
Panel: CMP
Project ID: 17-MAU-149
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Standard
Year Awarded: 2013
Title: The sub-national mechanisms of the ending of population growth: towards a theory of depopulation
Recipient(s): Professor NO Jackson | PI | University of Waikato
Dr LK Brabyn | AI | University of Waikato
Dr MP Cameron | AI | University of Waikato
Dr WR Cochrane | AI | University of Waikato
Dr DC Maré | AI | Motu Economic and Public Policy Research
Professor DI Pool | AI | University of Waikato
Public Summary: Population growth is theorised to cease globally around 2100, resulting in irreversible population shrinkage in most countries. Currently recognised only when it occurs at national level, the ending of growth has not yet been theorised to assist policy responses. Empirical evidence shows that the onset of decline begins sub-nationally, at different times, in different ways. Subnational decline is also increasingly driven by a new set of dynamics: negative natural increase (deaths exceeding births) combining with the old form of decline – net migration loss. This project will integrate demographic and mobility transition theories to develop a first-order theory of depopulation, proposing that the end of growth unfolds sequentially from rural to urban locales, the speed and severity of the trends magnified by unprecedented demographic-economic interactions. Our multi-disciplinary team will generate a substantive account of these mechanisms for New Zealand, a country still growing strongly at national level, but where decline is already the case in one-third of the 67 Territorial Authority Areas. Central to the analysis will be a nation-wide study of industrial labour market change, which we posit precedes the new form of decline, and determination of the counterfactual conditions under which growth could continue, locally and nationally.
Total Awarded: $747,826
Duration: 3
Host: University of Waikato
Contact Person: Professor NO Jackson
Panel: SOC
Project ID: 13-UOW-058
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Standard
Year Awarded: 2012
Title: The tenurial revolution in the Pacific and the Americas
Recipient(s): Prof RP Boast | PI | Victoria University of Wellington
Public Summary: In the 1860s New Zealand took the decisive step of remodelling Maori customary tenures by enacting the Native Lands Acts and by confiscating hundreds of thousands of acres of land in Taranaki and the Waikato and elsewhere. Maori land, as it is understood today, is no longer land in customary title but is based on freehold titles resting on grants from the Crown. New Zealand was not unique. In Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, Hawaii, the United States, and the Philippines it was the same. Lands held on customary tenures, in some cases tenures that the Spanish and other colonial authorities had recognised for centuries, were radically transformed into new, individualised tenures. Why did such a diverse array of colonial and ex-colonial countries embark on this 'reform' at more or less the same time? What did the reformers hope to achieve, and where did they get their ideas from? If the same legal and economic ideas were at work in Guatemala, Hawaii and New Zealand, how then can the very different outcomes of the reform process in these diverse countries be explained? This project will explore these issues, providing a critical and comparative synthesis of relevance to a wide audience.
Total Awarded: $508,696
Duration: 3
Host: Victoria University of Wellington
Contact Person: Prof RP Boast
Panel: HUM
Project ID: 12-VUW-155
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Fast-Start
Year Awarded: 2014
Title: The terrestrial carbon cycle in transition: tracking changes using novel tracers on multiple timescales
Recipient(s): Dr A Hartland | PI | University of Waikato
Associate Professor RN Drysdale | AI | University of Melbourne
Dr M Vandergoes | AI | GNS Science
Public Summary: In recent decades, the concentration of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) in many Northern Hemisphere inland water bodies has increased markedly, approximately doubling since 1970. This has shifted the balance of the terrestrial carbon cycle, potentially offsetting the absorption of atmospheric carbon dioxide by the terrestrial biosphere. Many contemporary explanations for increasing DOC imply a role for acidification due to increases in atmospheric sulfur emissions. An alternative hypothesis is the destabilisation of soil carbon by atmospheric warming. However, the simultaneous occurrence of atmospheric warming and acidification in the Northern Hemisphere prevents the separation of these drivers based on time series analysis in either river records or environmental archives. This project seeks to resolve the DOC debate by targeting novel geochemical proxies within high-resolution speleothem (cave carbonate) and lake sediment archives from New Zealand, which has seen pronounced positive temperature anomalies since ~1900 but remains unaffected by acidification. We will determine the effect of atmospheric warming on DOC release from soil ecosystems in order to refine our understanding of the mechanisms underlying historical DOC increases. In so doing, we will deliver new information on how the terrestrial carbon cycle is likely to respond to future climate transitions.
Total Awarded: $300,000
Duration: 3
Host: University of Waikato
Contact Person: Dr A Hartland
Panel: ESA
Project ID: 14-UOW-025
Fund Type: Marsden Fund
Category: Standard
Year Awarded: 2009
Title: The transcription factor code: maintaining neuronal identity and function in the adult brain
Recipient(s): Dr SM Hughes | PI | University of Otago
Dr RM Empson | PI | University of Otago
Public Summary: A major challenge in neurobiology is to understand the mechanisms that sustain neuronal identity and function in the adult brain. This project seeks to determine the function of a crucial developmental gene, FezF2 for the maintenance of adult motor neurons. Following specific and efficient viral-mediated genetic knockdown of FezF2 in adult motor neurons, targeted functional studies will determine how this developmental gene sustains motor neuron shape and behaviour. This study will establish new genetic tools for New Zealand that have the power to begin to unlock the complex codes of the mature brain.
Total Awarded: $831,111
Duration: 3
Host: University of Otago
Contact Person: Dr SM Hughes
Panel: BMS
Project ID: 09-UOO-182