University of Otago academics and senior students have gained five of the seven nationally-allocated scholarships in the latest Rutherford Foundation Trust Awards.
These annual awards provide early career support for some of the country's brightest and most promising researchers.
In a highly successful award round for Otago scholars, three Otago academics, Drs Charlotte King and Karen Reader, both anatomy, and geology Teaching Fellow Matthew Sagar gained three of the four Rutherford Postdoctoral Fellowships awarded nationally.
Drs King and Reader will continue their research at Otago, and Dr Sagar will move to Victoria University of Wellington.
These two-year fellowships provide a $75,000 annual stipend, and $10,000 a year for research costs, officials said.
Biochemistry honours student Max Wilkinson has gained a Cambridge-Rutherford Memorial PhD Scholarship to undertake doctoral studies in structural biology at Cambridge University, England.
These scholarships provide an annual 11,000 living allowance for up to three years.
Course and college fees are also paid and one return airfare between the United Kingdom and New Zealand is provided each year. Otago geography masters graduand Elisabeth Liddle also gained a PhD scholarship to study at Cambridge.
Dr King will focus on ''Major Transitions in Prehistory'', tracing health and diet in northern Chile.
She will investigate how prehistoric populations were affected by the change from societies based on hunting and gathering to a farming-based approach.
Dr Reader will focus on aspects of ovarian cancer, the fifth leading cause of cancer death in females, and consider if any of the proteins involved in the study could be used to detect patients who risked recurrent tumour growth.
She will also consider how a protein called Activin C modulated a subgroup of ovarian cancer, called modulated granulosa cell tumours.
Most patients with this tumour presented with early-stage symptoms and could be cured by surgery, but a significant number of patients risked dying from recurrent disease years later, officials said.
Dr Sagar will study radioactive isotope levels in rocks at the ''Big Bend'', an area on the Alpine Fault, where the Australian and Pacific tectonic plate boundary splits into several major and related faults, producing some large earthquakes including the 2013 Cook Strait earthquake sequence.
His project aims to help develop better local seismic hazard models. Mr Wilkinson's study in structural biology will focus on aspects of the three dimensional structures of proteins and nucleic acids which form the building blocks of our DNA.
Ms Liddle planned to study hydrogeology - the science of distribution and movement of water - focusing on groundwater availability issues in Zambia, officials said.
Other Rutherford awards: Postdoctoral Fellowship, Dr Sachi Kodippily, Auckland University; Cambridge-Rutherford Memorial PhD Scholarship, Mark Burrell.