Head of mathematics Jeanette Chapman was the recipient of this year's Otago Girls' High School board of trustees Highgate Fellowship, which will allow her to undertake extended professional development worth $20,000.
The fellowship rewards a teacher for their contribution to the school.
''It blew me away, actually. I didn't expect to be the recipient,'' she said.
As part of the fellowship, Ms Chapman hopes to travel to Denver, Colorado, next April to visit Nasa scientists who are studying and tracking the movement of Arctic and Antarctic ice.
Sea ice surrounding the Antarctic has been increasing, covering more of the southern oceans than it has since scientists began a long-term satellite record to map sea ice extent in the late 1970s.
However, the upward trend in the Antarctic is only about a third of the magnitude of the rapid loss of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean.
''It's really interesting, the differences between the two, and we often look at that at school as a statistics investigation.''
Ms Chapman also plans to attend the 2017 National Council of Mathematics Teachers Conference in Texas.
She hoped to catch up with one of the keynote speakers, who was part of a team writing the new statistics curriculum for United States schools.
''They're doing some really good, cutting edge statistical work, and I'm quite passionate about students having a good understanding of statistics because it's just so much in our lives.
''At the moment, a lot of them don't really understand statistics well when they read it. They don't think of the questions to ask, to critically think about reports in the media.''
She also hopes to attend some other mathematics conferences in London next November.
It is not the first award Ms Chapman has won. She has been the school's dux, and had won the Jan Gopi prize for the best third year statistics student, the 2006 University of Otago Prestigious Academic Scholarship, the 2011 New Zealand Association of Maths Teachers' Ernest Duncan Award and the 2015 Jim Campbell Mathematics Teacher Award.
