Dr Rangi Matamua, Associate Professor in the Faculty of Māori and Indigenous Studies, has received a Marsden grant to study how astronomy impacts upon cultural practices and is influenced by ecological and societal change. He was also the recipient of a Fulbright NZ Scholar Award which took him to Duluth, Minnesota, in June 2014.

Dr Michael Cameron, Senior Lecturer in Economics (WMS), is currently working on a number of externally funded projects, including a Health Promotion Authority-funded investigation into the impacts of alcohol outlet density on crime before and after the Sale & Supply of Alcohol Act came into force in 2013. Earlier research is presented here.

Dr Ryan Ko, Head of the Cyber Security Lab, has secured $12 million for a 6-year research project that will position NZ as a world leader in user-centric cyber security services that help people help themselves in security situations. STRATUS combines the expertise of leading national and international research organisations and industry players.

Dr Fiona Petchey, from the University's Radiocarbon Dating Laboratory, is a leading expert in bone and shell dating. Her unique combination of specialised archaeology and radiocarbon dating expertise has attracted multiple research contracts from the Marsden Fund and the Australian Research Council.

Dr Amanda Bateman, Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Education, is currently leading a three-year project funded by the Teaching and Learning Research Initiative (TLRI) that focuses on exploring and strengthening young children’s story-telling expertise, building in part on her prior TLRI-funded project ‘Pedagogical Intersubjectivity’.

Drs Mira Peter and Elaine Khoo, Senior Research Fellows in the Faculty of Education, are co-directing a two-year TLRI-funded project investigating the effect of a “flipped class” on undergraduate engineering students’ learning and mastering of threshold concepts and skills needed to become successful, workplace-ready graduates.

Dr Holly Thorpe and A/Prof Belinda Wheaton (Faculty of Education) are the first NZ-based researchers to receive a prestigious Advanced Research Project Grant from the International Olympic Committee to explore youth perceptions of the Olympic Games, informing decision-making about new Olympic sports, specifically action sports.

Rutherford Discovery Fellow Dr Adam Hartland (pictured) and Dr Beth Fox (School of Science) received a RISE award funded by the European Commission and the Royal Society of New Zealand to exchange with Cambridge, Potsdam and Mainz University staff on research to develop novel, quantitative proxies of past climate using speleothems (cave carbonates).