5 November 2019
University of Waikato researchers awarded $5.6m from Marsden Fund
Four University of Waikato researchers were today awarded Marsden Fund grants for 2019, including one project alone
receiving $3 million.
The highly competitive Marsden Fund grants are regarded as a hallmark of excellence for researchers working in New
Zealand. The grants fund research that benefits society as a whole.
University of Waikato Vice-Chancellor, Professor Neil Quigley, says receiving these grants reflects the quality and
diversity of the University’s research programmes, as well as the impact that Waikato researchers are having across
biological science, Māori language and culture in education, economics, and seismic geo-technology.
“It is particularly exciting for the University that Professor Vic Arcus has received one of the first-ever Marsden Fund
Council Awards, for his large interdisciplinary project on enzymes as catalysts for life on our planet.”
Professor Vic Arcus is the principal investigator for the largest funded project for Waikato University, which has been
given $3 million over three years to develop a unified theory for the temperature dependence of life, at a range of
scales over time and space.
The project will tackle one of the biggest challenges in interdisciplinary science; how to predict the behaviour of
biological systems and their responses to increasing greenhouse gases and climate warming.
Researchers from a range of disciplines including chemical physicists, molecular biologists, plant physiologists, soil
scientists, climate modellers and palaeoclimate experts will collaborate on the project.
Professor Mere Berryman, Professor David Lowe and Professor John Gibson were the other three Marsden Fund recipients
from the University of Waikato.
Professor Mere Berryman has been awarded $841,000 for her proposed research on how the education system in New Zealand
and in other colonised countries has overlooked Māori and Indigenous language and culture, by favouring Eurocentric
education models and policies.
This detrimentally influenced how those people view their own language, culture and identity across successive
generations. Professor Berryman and her team seek to understand the implications of this intergenerational loss, and the
interrelationships between language and culture. Specifically, the research intends to better understand the
socialisation of babies within families and their sense of belonging, emerging identities and language acquisition.
Professor David Lowe has been awarded $960,000 to look into hidden faults that pose a potential seismic risk beneath
Kirikiriroa Hamilton.
This project will analyse volcanic-ash layers (some of which have been liquefied) preserved in lake sediments, using
state-of-the-art techniques to measure the extent of ground shaking from large earthquakes over the last 20,000 years.
Knowing where people live and work within a country is critical to public policy and economic research, and Professor
John Gibson’s research titled ‘Mis-counting China’ has been awarded $858,000 to work towards correcting the current data
gap in China.
This gap has been created through systematic and time-varying errors in local population data, and the team’s revised
estimate of resident populations in China will be important in answering key questions on inequality, regional
development policy and quality of life. Professor Gibson’s co-principal investigator, Professor Xin Deng, is from the
Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Work on these projects will commence on 1 March 2020 unless otherwise stated.
ENDS