University of Auckland takes major PM’s Science Prizes

University of Auckland takes major Prime Minister’s Science Prizes

University of Auckland researchers have been honoured in this year’s Prime Minister’s Science Prizes, winning the top prize and the MacDiarmid Emerging Scientist Prize.
University of Auckland takes major Prime Minister’s Science Prizes

Embargoed until 5pm Wednesday November 11

University of Auckland researchers have been honoured in this year’s Prime Minister’s Science Prizes, winning the top prize and the MacDiarmid Emerging Scientist Prize.

Distinguished Professor Ian Reid and his colleagues Associate Professors Mark Bolland and Andrew Grey have won the Prime Minister’s Science Prize 2015 for their most recent bone research that has saved billions of dollars annually in reduced prescription costs.

Dr Alex Taylor has won the Prime Minister’s MacDiarmid Emerging Scientist Prize for research that gives new insights into the evolution of intelligence.

Vice-Chancellor Stuart McCutcheon said the University had celebrated a week of acknowledgement for the research achievements of its academics, with the two science prizes following Royal Society of New Zealand honours for five of its researchers and the announcement of $17 million of grants in the Marsden Fund round.

“This is an outstanding achievement and one of which the University is very proud,” he said.

Earlier this week, Professor Reid was awarded the Royal Society’s Rutherford Medal and the Health Research Council’s Liley medal for his decades of research into bone disease, particularly osteoporosis and Paget’s disease.

The winning research extends over several decades, using a broad suite of high-quality clinical research studies, including patient-level analyses of six trials with almost 25,000 participants.

This work revealed the ineffectiveness of treating osteoporosis with calcium and Vitamin D, while their other studies have also shown calcium supplements increase the risk of heart attacks in older people, at times by as much as 30 percent.

As a result of the team’s work, calcium and Vitamin D are no longer routinely recommended to prevent osteoporosis. The Prime Minister’s Science Prize, New Zealand’s highest value science award at $500,000, recognises the transformational nature of the team’s research and its worldwide impact.

Dr Taylor’s research is at the forefront of a shift in understanding animal intelligence and has fundamentally changed how intelligence across the animal kingdom has been viewed.

His work has focused on trying to understand how humans think differently from the rest of the animal kingdom by studying the cognitive and problem-solving ability of birds, particularly New Caledonian crows.

The research has explored the drivers of intelligence of this species that has demonstrated problem-solving abilities comparable to that of a five-year-old child, yet is separated from humans by 300 million years of evolution.

Dr Taylor showed crows could successfully complete an eight-stage puzzle in order to access food. One crow in particular, dubbed “007”, took just under three minutes to complete the test.

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