Search Rutherford Discovery Fellowship awards 2010–2017

Public Summary: Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are due to reach 400 parts per million in the next two years. These are some of the highest levels the Earth has experienced in the past 23 million years, and the most elevated since the Pliocene epoch 3 million years ago. These modern elevated levels are the consequence of man-made greenhouse gas emissions. Recent geological studies have indicated that when atmospheric carbon dioxide levels exceed the 350-400 ppm range in the geological past, the West Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheet melted, and combined with some melting of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, contributed to sea levels between 10-20 m higher than present. However, the consequences of Antarctic warming are more far reaching than sea level rise alone. Changes in the Southern Ocean sea ice belt around Antarctic would affect the primary plankton productivity in the Southern Ocean. Just as critical is that warming of the Antarctic weakens the temperature gradient between the poles and equators, as this changes the location and strength of the westerly winds that pass over the Southern Ocean and New Zealand latitudes. These winds help drive global ocean circulation, and regulate the relative location where Antarctic and tropical-sourced water masses meet. These waters currently meet in the latitude of New Zealand, and as we have a strongly maritime-influenced climate, changes in the Southern Ocean and Antarctic will have a profound impact on our climate. This research aims to reconstruct past Antarctic Ice Sheet variability and associated oceanographic change in the Southern Ocean and offshore of New Zealand using geological drill core data. These high resolution reconstructions will be conducted during selected time slices in the past 23 million years when carbon dioxide levels exceeded 400-450 parts per million. Intervals of interest include the Pliocene Warm Period (5.3 to 3.6 million years ago) and the Middle Miocene Climatic Optimum (~18 to 15 million years ago) - the two most recent periods when atmospheric CO2 levels exceeded modern-day levels of 400 ppm. As such, this study aims to address the following fundamental question 'How did the Antarctica Ice Sheet and the Southern Ocean respond to elevated levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases and global warming events during these past warmer climates, and what were the impacts to the oceans offshore of New Zealand?'. Specifically it will investigate 1) mechanisms for the high sensitivity of the Antarctic Ice sheets melting during moderately elevated levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide; 2) environmental forcings and responses in the Southern Ocean related to changes in ice sheet and sea ice extent; and 3) provide improved boundary conditions (i.e. inputs) for numerical computer models of greenhouse climates in the past and the future.

Public Summary: The 2010-2011 Canterbury earthquakes produced severe ground motions in the Christchurch urban area, and consequently extensive liquefaction and damage to structures and infrastructure. As a result of unique datasets which have been collected these earthquakes provide numerous opportunities to understand fundamental phenomena related to: (1) severe earthquake-induced ground motions and; (2) the seismic response of near-surface soil deposits. Using state-of-the-art analyses, combined with unique datasets and world-leading research expertise, this project will shed light on several profound ground motion observations which remain unresolved. As a result, this work will develop a unified understanding of the seismic response of urban areas residing on sedimentary basins with liquefiable soils. In particular, the project will: (i) characterize the geotechnical and geophysical properties of the earth’s crust using unique experimental methods in unprecedented detail; (ii) integrate state-of-the-art methods in ground motion and site response analysis to simulate the ground motions which were observed in the Canterbury earthquakes, physically infer the salient causative mechanisms, and hence explain numerous profound case-history observations of global relevance which remain unresolved; (iii) examine the significance of ‘topographic’, ‘basin-edge’, and ‘trampoline’ effects, whose phenomena still remain poorly understood, and where a unique set of abundant observations have been obtained from the Canterbury earthquakes; (iv) rigorously examine the role of modelling uncertainties in site-specific ground motion simulation in order to further understand the ability of such methods to be used for forward simulation of future earthquakes; and (v) quantify the hazard from major earthquakes on the Alpine, Hope, and Porters Pass faults which may occur in the near future, and severely affect Canterbury and other South Island urban centres. The impact of this research will result from a holistic understanding of the seismic wave propagation and local site effect dynamics that give rise to strong ground motions. As such, this research will have national and international impact in the assessment, and potential mitigation of, earthquake hazards in major cities.

Public Summary: 47% of New Zealanders suffer from a mental illness at some point in their lives, with 20% affected within a one-year period. Of these disorders, depression is by far the most common and, as such, it has a massive negative impact on our healthcare system, economy and personal lives. The treatments currently available for people with depression are only partially effective, but new research has the potential to improve these treatments significantly, so that patients can resume their normal lives more quickly. Specifically, newly-developed brain-scanning techniques are able to help us understand the biological basis of depression. Further, these techniques can allow us to study the medications used to treat depression and to determine why certain medications work in some patients but not in others. Last but not least, these brain-imaging techniques can be used to assist the treatment of depression., The aim of the research in this programme is to investigate the molecular bases of certain brain-imaging measures and to determine which measures can be used as the most effective “biomarkers” in the treatment of depression. To do this, we will conduct a series of drug studies with healthy volunteers using approved medications. The results will give us a detailed understading of the way the biomarkers respond to brain chemistry changes. This will allow us to develop a computational model, which will help us infer information about the brain chemistry of individual patients. We will then record these biomarkers in a large number of people who have depression and use our model to predict deficits in the brain chemistry of these individuals. In a subset of patients, we will record the biomarkers before giving the patients a rapid-acting but relatively short-lived treatment for depression. The data from this study will be used to test the model we will have developed, which will confirm the importance of the biomarkers in question. In the future, the science developed here could be used to guide individual patients to specific medicines; in other words, it will help create personalised-medicine pathways for each affected person and thus significantly improve treatment outcomes in depression.

Public Summary: Chronic kidney disease is common, affecting about 500,000 New Zealanders. Chronic kidney disease is important because it increases our chances of heart disease and death and may lead to needing treatment with dialysis or a kidney transplant. Dialysis therapy is a heavy and costly burden for patients and their families and the health system. However, finding reliable evidence to improve patient outcomes is hindered by the lack of rigorous summaries of evidence for many clinical questions that patients, doctors and policy-makers need answers to. The first focus for this research will be to understand whether using surrogate markers of health, common to research in this field, is useful when deciding whether treatments work. The second research focus explores important potential causes of poor quality of life for people with chronic kidney disease which can be tested in future trials to improve patient health and wellbeing. The third research focus will be to provide a comprehensive framework of understanding about existing treatments known to protect kidney function, so that clinicians, patients and funders can know which, of many, treatments is best with the fewest side-effects. Finally, the research will focus on how patients and healthcare providers experience chronic kidney disease care in Canterbury so that they can work together to find new and sustainable ways to improve healthcare for their own region. The research programme as a whole aims to provide rigorous overviews of existing research and participant-led enquiry to provide better and more useable information for clinicians, consumers and policy-makers in the field of chronic kidney disease.

Public Summary: An enormous amount of everyday products are reliant on synthetic chemistry for their production, including pharmaceuticals, agrochemicals, polymers, functional materials and dyes to name but a few. When constructing any of the above, chemists rely on functional group transformations to make new bonds during the synthesis process, a traditional practice that lacks atom, step and redox efficiency. The shortcomings associated with these existing methods have resulted in a demand for new initiatives that deliver more economical and environmentally friendly ways to make chemical bonds. Currently ignored when it comes to chemical synthesis, carbon-hydrogen (C-H) bonds are among the least reactive in organic chemistry. However, C-H bonds are highly abundant within organic molecules and thus constitute readily available handles upon which to conduct topologically obvious synthetic transformations. If these C-H bonds could be reacted in selective fashion, our reliance on inefficient functional group transformations would substantially diminish. In what constitutes a paradigm shift from traditional methods, this research will show that these readily available C-H bonds can be selectively manipulated (in a process called C-H functionalization) during the efficient chemical synthesis of several compounds relevant to the everyday products outlined above. The research will deliver valuable alternatives to the synthetic repertoire and will redefine how C-H bonds are perceived, moving them away from being classed as inert bystanders to being viewed as useful synthetic handles that can be manipulated selectively and efficiently.

Public Summary: Who defines marriage, which authorities govern it, and who ought to be allowed entry into marriage is contested in every society and culture. Marriage is debated because it is a foundational social, economic and cultural institution underpinned by a body of legislation that sets out a number of rights and benefits associated with it. Yet, despite the centrality of marriage to the formation of modern society, its historical development has been understudied in New Zealand. Through a comprehensive survey of social statistics as well as public and private records, this research programme will rectify the current dearth of analytic research in this field by investigating the centrality of private life to the formation of civic culture through three interrelated projects. The first project will investigate the evolution of legal definitions of marriage. The second project will examine religious debates over marriage, turning to explore its emotional dimensions in the form of public and community responses to inter-faith relationships. The final project will use the experiences of couples from diverse backgrounds to plot how marriage was understood and defined in their lives, thus moving the interpretation of 'marriage' beyond a singular focus upon its legal dimensions. In focusing on the perspectives of couples and the language they use to define the nature of their relationship the project will highlight the social and cultural significance of marriage on a public, private and emotional level. Each project will contribute to a research programme that aims to trace the historical dimensions of current debates about the legal definition of marriage, assessing to what extent marriage was used to demarcate access to the benefits of social citizenship, and to what degree private life was regulated by church, state, communities and families. Drawing connections between private life and political and public debate will generate new knowledge about the role of church, state and the family in regulating private matters, while paying attention to the contours of emotion and intimacy will add a new dimension to the study of New Zealand history.

Public Summary: Matroids are mathematical objects used for understanding the nature of space. Many branches of classical mathematical subjects are dedicated to studying space, but these classical tools are for use in continuous space; space that contains an infinite number of points. The mathematics underlying computer science is not continuous and infinite. Instead it is discrete and finite. Matroids are the tools we must use if we wish to understand space from a finite, discrete, point of view. Therefore we can think of matroid theory as being computer-age geometry. Model theory is the mathematical study of formal languages, and the structures they make statements about. In model theory, we ask what properties of mathematical structures can be expressed using sentences from a specified formal language. Although model theory has been extensively used in many areas of discrete mathematics, there are essentially no results in matroid theory that exploit model-theoretical techniques. The central aim of this project is to correct that omission.

Public Summary: Though the first diagram of a food web---the network of who eats whom in an ecosystem---was published in the late 1800s, the past decades in particular have seen tremendous growth in the data available to characterise empirical interaction networks. Studies of these webs have helped unravel the ecological determinants of community structure, as well as established an unambiguous link between species-species interactions and the resplendent biodiversity observed in natural ecosystems. As a result of these studies, it is easy to conclude that the community-scale consequences of species' interactions have never been clearer; and yet the ecological and evolutionary implications for populations of individual species remain a mystery. Moreover, because we have been studying present-day networks through an ecological lens, we do not understand the interplay between speciation, extinction, and adaptation and a community's ability to maintain its biodiversity, species composition, or the structure of the interactions between species. The overall objective of my proposed research is therefore to bridge this gap and to build toward a general theory of evolution in ecological networks. The business magnate Warren Buffett once said that 'Wide diversification is only required when investors do not understand what they are doing.' Buffett's primary interests are clearly not in ecology; there are, however, strong parallels between what it takes to maintain either a functional financial sector or a persistent ecological community. Unfortunately, while economics seeks to rigorously outline the costs and benefits of entering a market, we still do not know what trade-offs are experienced by a species as a result of forming part of a larger, more complex community. Without quantifying the evolutionary component of who actually 'benefits' in ecological networks---the individuals, the species, or the community---we will continue to be limited in our understanding of the structure, function, and future of ecological communities.

Public Summary: New Zealand has the 4th largest exclusive economic zone in the world. We depend on the economic and environmental value of this marine estate, through fisheries, shipping activities, energy and mineral exploration, tourism and recreational use. All these activities generate significant noise alongside the natural sounds produced by the animals; making the ocean an increasingly noisy place. This myriad of sounds can travel large distances in all directions due to the excellent transmission of sound in water. Of major concern is that manmade sources have doubled the level of ambient background noise of the worlds oceans. A way to monitor these activities is passive acoustics i.e. listening to the sea. Not only can passive acoustics be used to monitor man-made sources, but research has shown that it can be used to monitor the natural marine environment, with reefs separated by a few kilometres having significantly different sound signatures. Therefore, passive acoustics can be used to monitor human and biological activities and their interactions. In some ways, this is analogous to remote sensing from space which has generated huge progress in our understanding of terrestrial systems and the sea-surface. However, space-based remote sensing cannot characterise the water column below the ocean surface whereas acoustics has that potential. The general goal of this research is to understand the acoustic ecology of the pelagic environment, as a contribution to understanding, monitoring and management of coastal marine environments. The proposed research specifically tests the proposition that passive acoustics can provide an efficient cost-effective mechanism for monitoring ecosystem health.

Public Summary: After the horrors of World War Two, New Zealand played a leading role in the development of international human rights laws and norms. With a strong tradition of giving everyone 'a fair go', New Zealanders were keen to establish legal and structural safeguards to protect those most vulnerable at home and abroad. Through the 1970s and 1980s, in particular, New Zealand proudly introduced human rights norms into domestic law and policy, and developed new institutions like the Human Rights Commission to provide oversight and education. This approach culminated with the introduction of the Bill of Rights Act in 1990 (BORA), which embedded international civil and political rights into New Zealand's legal framework. Yet, recent evidence shows that human rights are in decline in New Zealand. Many previous human rights standards have deteriorated, new laws frequently conflict with the rights contained in BORA, legal commentators detail that human rights cases are almost impossible to win, and human rights are often negatively represented within governmental and media discourse. This leads to a question: what happened to human rights? Drawing upon a qualitative multi-method approach that employs extensive documentary analysis as well as interviews and focus groups, this project considers the status of human rights in New Zealand. It examines the factors that have turned New Zealand's approach from one in which human rights were optimistically implemented and enhanced to a stance that is more pessimistic, where human rights are discursively and practically undermined. The research will specifically address these concerns in relation to three populations that are linked to weakened human rights practices: children in trouble with authorities, prisoners and asylum seekers/refugees. It considers the contexts in which their rights have been both observed and curtailed from the end of World War Two to the present day. In doing so, it will examine the role of official and public discourse in providing legitimacy and support for human rights action and negation. The project will also chart the contemporary challenge to human rights erosion, and explain the ways in which New Zealanders and international actors continue to affirm human rights for the three groups in this study. The research will, finally, explore how the culture of human rights can be reinvigorated in New Zealand, and explain why this move is important to New Zealand society, both locally and globally. This research will lead to new knowledge about changes in human rights thinking, action and culture. The principal investigator will produce a number of academic outputs, including an original monograph on the factors that have enhanced or impeded human rights in New Zealand and an edited book on how human rights cultures can be developed. The project will provide professional opportunities for emerging criminology scholars and will also be 'community conscious', as the principal investigator will actively disseminate new findings to the New Zealand public, civil society organizations, academia and government.