UC researchers receive Fellowships
Thursday, 11 November 2010, 3:21 pm
Press Release: University of Canterbury
UC researchers receive new Rutherford Discovery Fellowships
Three UC researchers are among the first recipients of a new government-funded scheme designed to support early to mid-career researchers.
The Rutherford Discovery Fellowships will provide financial support of up to $200,000 per year to the researchers over a five-year period, with funding going towards both their salary and programme of work.
Ten recipients were announced on Wednesday night at the annual Royal Society of New Zealand's Research Honours celebration event.
UC researchers who received the inaugural awards were Dr Jason Tylianakis (Biological Sciences), Associate Professor Jennifer Hay (Languages, Cultures and Linguistics) and incoming staff member Dr Paul Gardner, who will take up a position at UC in April next year based in the School of Biological Sciences.
Dr Tylianakis will use the new funding to assist his research programme investigating the interplay of species traits and resource constraints during the assembly and disassembly of ecological networks in changing environments.
Global environmental changes threaten biodiversity, but their effects on the networks of interactions connecting all living organisms are largely unknown. Using analyses of global datasets, combined with a field study in the unique Franz Josef chronosequence – where networks of different time periods are revealed as the glacier retreats – Dr Tylianakis will study these network structures in detail and relate this to the function of ecosystems.
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The Rutherford Discovery Fellowship will allow Professor Hay, Director of the New Zealand Institute for Language, Brain and Behaviour, to conduct research into episodic word memory.
Individuals know many hundreds of thousands of words. Recent results indicate that what we know about each word is shaped in a dynamic ongoing way with our own experience with that word. Professor Hay's research programme explores this episodic word memory – asking what the range of environments (social, physical and contextual) in which we encounter a word does to the way we hear, use and pronounce that word.
Bioinformatician Dr Gardner will put the new funding to use on a research programme looking at bioinformatic approaches to functionally characterise RNAs.
Together with proteins, fats, sugars and DNA, RNA is a member of the selected group of molecules that play a major role in life's chemical machinery. Recent scientific advances have shown that RNAs are important for turning genes on and off in response to different signals. Dr Gardner, who will return to New Zealand from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, United Kingdom, will use UC’s BlueFern supercomputer facility to perform computational analyses of RNAs to find out more about their diverse functions.
Minister of Research, Science and Technology Wayne Mapp said the Rutherford Discovery Fellowships were an important scheme within New Zealand's research system.
“Science and innovation are at the heart of building our economic growth. These fellowships empower leading researchers who are at a critical juncture in their careers,” he said.
The new fellowships, administered by the Royal Society of New Zealand, have been set up to fill a gap in support for researchers in the three to 10 year period after they complete a doctorate degree. It has been found that this is the time when many researchers can find it difficult to progress their careers, especially in areas with heavy competition for funding. The funding will help them establish their career in New Zealand.
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