‘Local research with global impact’ could describe many of the offerings coming from Independent Research Organisations (IROs) in the past year. As we prepare a briefing for the incoming Minister of Science, Innovation and Technology, the Hon. Judith Collins, the growth of IROs as a significant player in the New Zealand Science System, the impact of their research, and the key role they play in increasing business expenditure on research and development (BERD) is highlighted.
With impact across the spectrum from local communities to global markets, IRANZ members and associates employ over 1250 staff and have a combined turnover of around $170 million p.a., with approximately $75 million of research investment from Government and $35 million from independent stakeholders. IRANZ also provides an independent voice for Māori research organisations. The total IRO science infrastructure is approximately equivalent to two CRIs.
So far this year we have welcomed a further five Independent Research Organisations to the Independent Research Association’s (IRANZ) fold – indicative of a thriving independent research sector outside of government.
Meri Kirihimete me te Hape Nū Ia from the team at IRANZ. Things don't get more kiwi Christmas than a kākā (Nestor meridionalis) in a pohutukawa tree. Photo: Louise Thomas.
Cawthron Institute has welcomed seven talented tertiary students to commence their highly sought after summer research placements. Photo: Cawthron Institute.
After 14½ years leading Lincoln Agritech, CEO Peter Barrowclough has announced his resignation, saying his time at the research institute has been the most rewarding part of his career.
“I am so proud of what we have achieved together,” says Peter.
“During my time as CEO this company has grown from 35 staff and $5.5m turnover to around 80 staff and $15m turnover today. We have won a significant amount of MBIE funding, undertaken many science and engineering feats, and contributed to the store of knowledge. We have commercialised many technologies, and our science has had great impact.
“Throughout it all we have strived together as a team, and this has made Lincoln Agritech a great place to work.”
Peter’s last day in the role will be Friday 22 December. He is looking forward to starting the last phase of his career, concentrating on governance and consultancy.
The Board will appoint an interim CEO who will start in the New Year, before beginning the search for the next permanent CEO.
Armin Werner, Lincoln Agritech’s Group Manager of Precision Agriculture, said the ability to join European colleagues on Horizon Europe projects was a welcome step for New Zealand researchers working on global problems. Photo: Lincoln Agritech.
Lincoln Agritech has joined one of the largest research programmes in the world, as a partner in a four-year Horizon Europe project.
Horizon Europe is the European Union’s key funding programme for research and innovation, with a total budget of €95.5 billion (NZ$173 billion) for its ninth seven-year cycle. In 2023 New Zealand became an associated country, meaning our researchers can join to establish and run research projects on equal terms with European partners and receive funding.
Lincoln Agritech has joined universities and research institutions from Greece, Austria, Italy, Belgium, France, and Lithuania on a project to develop a digital system to detect and provide early warning of plant diseases and pests. The Agricultural University of Athens, Greece, is leading the project.
Known as STELLA, the project has a budget of €5m (NZ$9m). It begins this December and finishes in December 2027.
New Zealand’s first trial of a ground-breaking cancer treatment called CAR T-cell therapy has shown the promise of being safer than leading commercial CAR T-cell products in treating certain types of blood cancer, while remaining effective.
The Malaghan Institute’s ENABLE phase 1 safety trial began in late 2019, in partnership with Wellington Zhaotai Therapies Ltd, treating 21 New Zealanders with relapsed or refractory B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma who had exhausted all conventional treatment options.
Preliminary results were published online on 3 November in an abstract accepted for presentation at the American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting in San Diego. Importantly, none of the participants developed neurotoxicity or severe cytokine release syndrome – common side effects of some commercial CAR T-cell therapies. The trial also showed promising effectiveness, with around half of the participants’ lymphomas in complete response three months after receiving the treatment.
The world’s largest trial of multiple interventions for critically ill adults with COVID-19 has simultaneously released results about two of its treatments, vitamin C and simvastatin.
Published on 26 October in JAMA and NEJM, and presented at the European Society of Intensive Care Medicine in Milan, the studies are part of the ongoing Randomized Embedded Multifactorial Adaptive Platform for Community Acquired Pneumonia (REMAP-CAP) trial.
Simvastatin, a widely available and inexpensive drug that is included on the WHO (World Health Organization) list of essential medicines, was shown to have a high probability (96%) of improving outcomes (a combination of survival and length of time patients need support in an intensive care unit) when started as a treatment for critically ill patients with COVID-19, and a 92% chance of improving survival at 3 months. This equates to one life saved for every 33 patients treated with simvastatin. 2684 critically ill patients were included at 141 hospitals across 13 countries, including in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Some of the best scientific minds from New Zealand and overseas were in Gisborne to take part in a two-day symposium hosted by Mātai Medical Research Institute on 23 and 24 November.
Mātai chief executive and research director Dr Samantha Holdsworth says the goal was to share knowledge to accelerate innovations that improve quality of life.
The scientists, many of whom are leaders in their field, talked about topics such as ADHD, concussion, Parkinson’s disease, brain injury, heart research, and health models for Pacific people.
Dr Holdsworth said the symposium would serve as a catalyst for building strong interdisciplinary networks among professionals and the community to solve problems and innovate more quickly.
Neuroscientist Dr Jerome Maller talked about the rapid rise in the clinical use and validation of non-invasive brain stimulation techniques, particularly transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) for the treatment of mental health disorders, such as major depression. Dr Maller, who is associate professor and clinical director for GE Healthcare and has nearly 20 years of experience in the field of TMS, presented an overview of this technique. Photo: Mātai.
Cawthron Institute welcomes news that a collaborative research project led by Dr Aisling Rayne has received a Marsden Fund grant. ‘Live or let die: Are hybrid species worthy of conservation?’ is a three-year research project that will investigate the diverse moral and social perspectives on hybrid species and their value in conservation policy and practice in Aotearoa New Zealand and around the world.
This research will have important implications for the conservation of taonga (treasured) species of Aotearoa.
“We’ll be working with different communities to understand how people know, value and engage with hybrid species, as well as what values currently – and should – inform decision making processes about hybrids in conservation,” says Dr Rayne.
“These questions are becoming more urgent, as species are increasingly interacting due to human-assisted movement, climate change and habitat alteration.”
Hybrid ducks descended from both introduced mallard ducks and the rare native pārera/grey duck (pictured) have presented questions for Aotearoa New Zealand’s conservation sector. Photo: Louise Thomas.
Bat1K researchers have been collaborating with the Bragato Research Institute to sequence the genome of New Zealand’s native bat.
Bat1K is an initiative to sequence the genomes of all living bat species, approximately 1400 species in total. The group aims to uncover the genes and genetic mechanisms behind the unusual adaptations of bats, essentially mine the bat genome to uncover their secrets.
The New Zealand lesser short-tailed bat (Mystacina tuberculata) stands apart from its bat counterparts around the world. Native to New Zealand and endangered, it holds the distinction of being the most terrestrial of all bat species. It is one of the few bats in the world that spends large amounts of time on the forest floor, using its folded wings as ‘front limbs’ for scrambling around.
Bragato's Oxford Nanopore PromethION Sequencer at their Grapevine Improvement Laboratory is the first high-throughput third-generation sequencer in New Zealand, as such, Bragato has made the technology available as a service to other researchers from any field - and it has certainly lead to some interesting collaborations.
Climate change is having an impact in New Zealand and there are well-recognised issues including warming temperature and sea level rise, as well as the wider consequences, such as more extreme rainfall events and more prolonged droughts. There has been much focus on issues such as increased water requirements for irrigation or impacts on groundwater levels and hence on water availability, but the impacts on groundwater quality have had limited investigation.
Researchers at Aqualinc say whilst we can’t easily predict how the changing climate will affect how much nitrate ends up in our groundwater and surface water systems, we can observe how existing weather events affect the measurements we can make now. We do know that high winter recharge is associated with elevated nitrate concentrations, as shown by the response to the extreme weather events in May 2021 and July 2022 where monitoring showed elevated nitrate concentrations for considerable periods of time following the rainfall. Recent investigations in Canterbury have highlighted just how important rainfall, and particularly the onset of winter recharge, can be in terms of driving nitrate leaching.
Dr Karaitiana Taiuru from Taiuru and Associates elaborates on a recent RNZ interview about the Ministry of Social Development (MSD) rolling out Facial Recognition Technology for beneficiaries to self-identity online without the need to visit a MSD office, despite the well-documented racism and bias of the systems.
"The Ministry of Social Development’s decision is lacking a privacy, human rights, and ethics framework – though this was a must-have, it said, and with no consultation with Māori, a total disregard for international research and literature that shows the bias and racist way the technology impacts People of Colour such as Māori and Pasifika.
"It was also revealed by RNZ that the Facial recognition technology has failed half the time in tests of a landmark government system, adding to the costs, time and questions around it."
He also says that Google Analytics is being used in the system. "The way Google Analytics sends metadata back to the US for processing has fallen foul of regulators in Austria, Denmark, Italy, France, and The Netherlands this year."
Incentives are becoming more common in research – Staff at Scarlatti know, they conduct hundreds of surveys and interviews per year. They also know that people’s time is valuable and that many industries are seeing ‘survey fatigue’.
Scarlatti Research Manager Julie Moularde writes about the problem in this Scarlatti case study. "When finding respondents becomes challenging, one solution is to offer an incentive. This might seem like the perfect golden ticket to fix your response rates, but should you be using them?"
Julie says that while offering an incentive can maximise participation and completion rates there are a number of factors to consider. When deciding whether offering an incentive is right for your research, she suggests asking yourself some key questions. A negative answer to any of them likely means an incentive is not recommended.
Firstly, do you have a sufficient budget for incentives? "Cost varies depending on incentive type, but your budget needs to allow for it. By estimating what you might save on recruitment, you could reallocate some of your budget toward incentives."
BRANZ’s Principal Social Scientist, Dr Casimir MacGregor, recently participated in a collaboration with Victoria University of Wellington to publish the research paper ‘The feeling of comfort in residential settings I: a qualitative model’, in the Buildings and Cities journal.
The project was led-by VUW’s Germán Molina and co-written by additional VUW researchers Michael Donn and Micael-Lee Johnstone. In the paper, the researchers propose a new qualitative measure, the feeling of comfort, to capture how comfortable people feel in their homes. Previous research has focussed on using quantitative methods.
This new qualitative method could potentially inform future building design and building science practice.
The authors also believe it may be able to capture, organise, and structure the psychology and subjectivity of comfort in a usable model, and so become a basis for policy-making, building performance analysis, and comfort research.
Casimir MacGregor has co-authored a paper presenting the results of a qualitative study aimed at understanding comfort. It introduces the 'feeling of comfort' model. Photo: BRANZ.
Steel structures play a key role in various sectors from manufacturing to infrastructure, the energy industry, transportation, pressure equipment and more. One of the critical challenges to ensure the safety and reliability of such structures is addressing fatigue design, which can significantly impact performance and longevity - particularly at welded connections.
HERA has undertaken several research and educational initiatives to tackle these challenges.
Read a feature article about HERA's research in Builders and Contractors Magazine on page 30. The article also looks at their collaboration with University of Michigan's Professor Pingsha Dong, who is also a key collaborator on the Circular Design research project in the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment Endeavour-funded project Construction 4.0.
Current programmes include the seismic research programme focussing on the seismic performance of welded structures, an expert field often referred to as 'low cycle fatigue'. In addition, HERA has been developing recommendations to optimise welds for bridges subject to high cycle fatigue. Photo: HERA.
In a prime example of 'let's give this a shot,' WSP Research is gearing up to drill numerous holes in temporary traffic signs to assess their resilience in strong winds.
The theory being tested is that wind will pass through the holes – meaning the signs will experience less wind load and be less likely to blow over. Apart from school patrol lollipops, perforated signs aren’t used in New Zealand.
Part of the reason is that drilling small holes in sheet metal has been a long, manual process. But now, thanks to the latest computer numerical machining technology, it can be completed more efficiently and automatically.
In New Zealand, road traffic fatalities make up around 30 percent of all worker fatalities and between 22-36 percent of the national road fatalities including workers, bystanders, and commuters. Similar patterns possibly exist for serious injury and minor injury crashes. As a result, work-related road safety is a strategic priority in New Zealand’s road safety strategy, Road to Zero.
A Mackie Research study using Safe System and socio-technical analysis methods to better understand crashes occurring while people are driving for work has recently been published in the ACRS Journal of Road Safety.
The research provides insights into work-related crashes, showing that failure across a greater number of Safe System components was associated with higher crash severity. Results also showed that the burden of injury from crashes is often borne by those not driving for work, including vulnerable road users. The researchers say looking ‘upstream’ can point to areas not normally focussed on, such as fitness-to-drive procedures. The AA Research Foundation supported this study.
The research simulates the effects of climate and water allocation approaches on water demand, surface-water flows, and ground water levels in representative case-study areas, then iteratively re-designs and tests potential water allocation policies to achieve the level of policy agility required to successfully adapt to climate change. Photo: Aqualinc.
How might water allocation methods need to change in response to a changing climate to give effect to Te Mana o Te Wai and the National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management 2020? was the question being addressed in a recently published research report, Agile, Adaptive Water Allocation
Policy, a Sustainable Land Management and Climate Change – Adaptation
project prepared for the Ministry for Primary Industries by Drs John Bright, Andrew Dark, Julian Weir, and Jane Alexander.
The authors write that having the agility to vary water allocations on a daily to weekly frequency in response to short-term variations in
stream flow is critical to maintaining or improving stream-health and enables adaptation to a changing climate.
"This is important because short-term variations are expected to become more extreme and current extreme
events more frequent."
They write that groundwater takes and surface water takes must be managed together – that is, integrated allocation management is required. "It is unrealistic to define allocation rules for each independently of the other and expect to be able to prevent surface water allocation limits being breached."
From reefs to rugged hillsides, scientists have been mapping the damage caused by Cyclone Gabrielle to help inform future decisions about where to build, and how storms impact the environment. This RNZ article by Kate Green includes work by scientists at the Cawthron Institute.
Ross Sneddon, a coastal environmental scientist with Cawthron, was part of a team tasked with mapping the Napier harbour, part of business-as-usual monitoring for the port's consenting process for dredging the harbour to deepen the approach for big ships.
But after the cyclone, it took scientists six months to get a clear three-day window to see anything around Pania Reef, thanks to all the sediment washed down the rivers into the harbour and continually churned up by large swells. They were scheduled to go in April, but in the end they were not able to get out there until late October.
"The real problem with scheduling the monitoring activities is due to variations in underwater visibility. It's a fairly swell prone open coastal site, and it's very often got low visibility," Sneddon said.
Cawthron coastal environmental scientist Ross Sneddon surveying Pania Reef following the seabed transect line and recording data on a slate. Photo: Scott Edhouse, Cawthron Institute.
It’s flower picking season – but not as you know it. Recently, a group of Westpac NZ employees got down and dirty to help Cawthron scientists collect hundreds of tiny seagrass flowers from the Waimea/Waimeha Estuary.
The mahi is part of a three-year project led by Cawthron to restore New Zealand’s seagrass meadows as a way of supporting biodiversity, improving water quality and combatting climate change.
The Westpac NZ Government Innovation Fund is one of several business, government, industry and environmental groups that Cawthron has partnered with to deliver the project. Now in its second year, the project is successfully developing restoration techniques using seagrass seeds – something that’s never been done before in New Zealand.
This all starts with hand collecting seagrass flowers, which then get transported to the Cawthron Aquaculture Park at Glenduan where they are put into specially developed aquaria dubbed “seagrass spas”. A few weeks later – when they’re ready – the seeds fall from the flowers and then they are stored until it is time for germination.
There are two factors that influence how a vine grows: its genetics and its environment. The Bragato Research Institute’s Grapevine Improvement Programme investigates the genetic side, to learn more about resilience and new clones naturally occurring in our vineyards.
In New Zealand, every grapevine clone we currently grow originated in a vineyard, often because someone noticed something odd and collected it. BRI is collecting odd vines or ‘bud sports’ to add to the industry’s growing collection of grapevine diversity.
Carla Kissane-Rako is a Technical Viticulturist at Delegat’s Wairau Valley vineyards which span 550 hectares next to the Wairau River. Despite the vast number of vines under her care, Carla knows every row and there are a few vines that have caught her eye this season.
Like other viticulturists around the country, when she notices an unusual vine, Carla makes a record and keeps an eye on it over several weeks. If the ‘odd vines’ continue to develop, she submits a photo to "OddVine".
Three vines in this vineyard have developed variegated canes that produce yellow-green leaves, stripey stems, inflorescences and even stripey fruit. Photo: Bragato Research Institute.
"A previous PhD project at the University of Canterbury used thermodynamics and programming to model and predict the formation of precipitates such as calcium phosphate in milk. While wine and milk share differences such as the higher protein levels in milk and the ethanol and phenolic content of wine, some of the key components are similar," writes researcher Jack Muir. Photo: Bragato Research Institute.
Throughout the winemaking process, it is possible for crystals to start growing in wine. While these solids are harmless and don’t typically impact the wine’s taste, they are considered undesirable and can cause a wine to be perceived as low quality. New research at the Bragato Research Institute aims to understand and predict the precipitation of calcium tartrate in wine and form guidelines to help prevent precipitation. To do this, a model of ion equilibria and precipitation in dairy has been adapted to wine.
Tests of the model on simple systems have been done to check if it matches experimental work, now the model will be tested to see how well it can predict crystal growth in real wines, with complex chemistry.
As the world moves to more sustainable forms of energy, efficient rechargeable batteries are becoming more and more important.
At present the lithium-ion batteries used for everything from mobile phones to EVs include materials such as cobalt, which are in short supply and are also toxic to the environment.
New materials that are less expensive, less toxic, provide more energy for the same size, and make it easier to recycle lithium could bring sustainable energy a step closer.
Lincoln Agritech Research Scientist Joseph Nelson (Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Ngāti Raukawa) has just been awarded $360,000 from the Marsden Fund to find some of those new materials – using his computer.
“Finding new, improved materials that hopefully lead to more efficient batteries and lower environmental impact can happen in one of two ways,” says Dr Nelson.
A cellular receptor, once notorious for its interaction with environmental toxins is now being investigated for its potentially critical role in supporting immune health.
Dr Jeffry Tang is a Senior Research Fellow working in the Gasser Lab at the Malaghan Institute. He specialises in nutritional immunology, studying how metabolites – molecules produced when food is broken down and absorbed by the body – affect our health. His research focuses on the aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AhR), a protein receptor found in a variety of cells across the body. A receptor is like a lock on the surface of or within a cell that can only be unlocked by specific molecules that fit into the receptor. When the right molecule binds to a receptor, it unlocks a particular action within the cell.
“Once a molecule binds to the AhR, the receptor and the molecule migrate to the nucleus, the cell’s command hub, where it has the ability to activate select genes,” says Jeffry.
The discovery of the AhR was made by research into why a class of environmental pollutants called dioxins is so harmful to health - including causing reproductive and developmental problems, damage to the immune system, and cancer.
RNZ's Kim Hill speaks to CAR T pioneer and BioOra board member Prof Carl June MD and Malaghan Institute Clinical Director Dr Rob Weinkove about the promising results of New Zealand's first CAR T-cell clinical trial, and the history and future of this ground-breaking cancer immunotherapy. They are joined by writer and poet Michele Leggott, a participant in the trial, who is 12 months on from treatment.
HERA: Ep.100 – Constructing for resilience and durability
In this episode of Stirring the Pot HERA talks with Raed El Sarraf. Raed is Technical Principal at WSP New Zealand. He has extensive experience in corrosion engineering and asset integrity management of structural steel and other metal structures.
Cawthron Aquaculture Park Open Day 2023
The Cawthron Institute recently hosted its first open day in many years - hundreds of people turned out to see first hand research being done at the Aquaculture Park.
IRANZ has gone social. For up-to-date information about the activities of our member organisations and notification of updates to the website follow us on the link below.
IRANZ is an association of independent research organisations. Its members undertake scientific research, development or technology transfer. Members include Aqualinc Research Ltd, Bragato Research Institute, BRANZ, Cawthron Institute, DigiLab, Dragonfly Data Science, Gillies McIndoe Research Institute, Heavy Engineering Research Association (HERA), International Global Change Institute (IGCI), Land & Water Science, Leather & Shoe Research Association (LASRA), Lincoln Agritech Ltd, Mackie Research, Malaghan Institute of Medical Research, Manawatū AgriFood Digital Lab, Medical Research Institute of New Zealand (MRINZ), Mātai Medical Research, M.E Research, Motu Economic and Public Policy Research, New Zealand Brain Research Institute, New Zealand Institute of Minerals to Materials Research, Scarlatti, Taiuru & Associates, Takarangi Research Group,
Te Tira Whakāmataki, WSP, and Xerra Earth Observation Institute.
Contact: Dr Rob Whitney, Executive Officer, mobile: +64 27 2921050, email: information@iranz.org.nz
