Biggest Marsden funding boost yet for Otago uni researchers

Associate Prof Sian Halcrow (left) and research associate Dr Melanie Miller at the University of Otago anatomy department. Photo: Gregor Richardson
Associate Prof Sian Halcrow (left) and research associate Dr Melanie Miller at the University of Otago anatomy department. Photo: Gregor Richardson
University of Otago researchers are celebrating after gaining $28.5million in the latest Marsden Fund round.

It is the university's greatest success in this highly competitive grant process.

This year, Otago researchers were funded for 41 research projects, including $300,000 Fast Start grants for early-career researchers, well up on Otago's $24million for 33 projects last year.

Associate Prof Sian Halcrow, of the anatomy department, was yesterday ''very, very happy'' to receive $826,000, over three years, to study the ''impacts of social inequality on human health in ancient China''.

The funding would meet overall costs and support the work of associate investigator Dr Melanie Miller, Prof Halcrow said.

The study covered the period 5000BC to AD2020 and was the ''first New Zealand-run bioarchaeological project in China''.

The Otago researchers would work closely with Chinese and other international colleagues to assess health and diet in large skeletal samples.

Social inequality had ''significant repercussions'' for nearly half the world's population who now lived in poverty, ''affecting women and children most severely''.

The overall funded Otago research was broad and varied.

Vice-chancellor Harlene Hayne will receive $827,000 to investigate how judicial instructions and questions influence jurors.

The project aims to develop better processes to help juries evaluate the evidence before them, and to use that evidence to reach a just verdict.

Palaeontologist Prof Ewan Fordyce, of the geology department, received $928,000 to investigate a ''global dark age'' in whale evolution, 23-20 million years ago, about which little was known.

South Island fieldwork had recovered unprepared whale fossils of the right age and investigations would be made, he said.

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