Events

This annual science fair is always packed with fascinating projects. It encourages intermediate and secondary school students throughout Otago to expand their scientific and technological thinking through planning, carrying out, and presenting their own original experiments.

With 270 high quality and innovative entries – spanning topics like reviewing the efficacy and value for money of fabric whiteners, to developing a weed spraying robot – there will be topics to pique everyone’s interests.

Take the time to browse through this early work of Aotearoa New Zealand’s next generation of scientists!

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This annual science fair is always packed with fascinating projects. It encourages intermediate and secondary school students throughout Otago to expand their scientific and technological thinking through planning, carrying out, and presenting their own original experiments.

With 270 high quality and innovative entries – spanning topics like reviewing the efficacy and value for money of fabric whiteners, to developing a weed spraying robot – there will be topics to pique everyone’s interests.

Take the time to browse through this early work of Aotearoa New Zealand’s next generation of scientists!

More information

This annual science fair is always packed with fascinating projects. It encourages intermediate and secondary school students throughout Otago to expand their scientific and technological thinking through planning, carrying out, and presenting their own original experiments.

With 270 high quality and innovative entries – spanning topics like reviewing the efficacy and value for money of fabric whiteners, to developing a weed spraying robot – there will be topics to pique everyone’s interests.

Take the time to browse through this early work of Aotearoa New Zealand’s next generation of scientists!

More information

This annual science fair is always packed with fascinating projects. It encourages intermediate and secondary school students throughout Otago to expand their scientific and technological thinking through planning, carrying out, and presenting their own original experiments.

With 270 high quality and innovative entries – spanning topics like reviewing the efficacy and value for money of fabric whiteners, to developing a weed spraying robot – there will be topics to pique everyone’s interests.

Take the time to browse through this early work of Aotearoa New Zealand’s next generation of scientists!

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What’s next for New Zealand in the fight against climate change?

Join Professor James Renwick and New Zealand’s Minister for Climate Change Hon James Shaw for a conversation about climate change in New Zealand between leading climate change scientist. They will discuss what is currently being done in our country to combat climate change, what more we can do in the future, and how COVID-19 may have changed things.

Professor Renwick and Minister Shaw will discuss their views and expertise on New Zealand’s climate change present and future for around 40 minutes before opening to the audience for further questions.

Registration is essential to attend this event.

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The natural sciences that allow us to understand the environment are at the heart of developing strategies to adapt to, survive, and thrive as climate changes. Water is at the heart of many of the most complex problems in climate sciences: understanding the behavior of clouds in a warmer world, how land ecosystems mediate evolving rainfall patterns, and when weather patterns trigger decline of the polar ice sheets. The behavior of these macrophysical problems can be interrogated by knowing the details of the microscopic properties of water: small variations in the abundance of naturally occurring heavy oxygen and hydrogen isotopes in water. Utilizing the stable isotope chemistry requires integrating many scientific disciplines and linking disparate areas of theoretical, observational and modeling techniques.

Professor Noone will give examples of the coupling of carbon and water cycles in forests, and in the interaction of forest fire and clouds. He will discuss the importance of the sciences which form the kernel that enable evidence-based decision making, and the opportunities for leveraging physical sciences to empower communities to shape their responses to climate change.

Professor Noone is a natural scientist whose specialty is on understanding relationships between water, clouds and changing global wind patterns. He is most well-known for his work blending isotope ratios in the atmosphere and on the landscape with more traditional atmospheric science, in both modeling and observational contexts. He helps build and use climate models that are used predict future climate change. He has served as a member of several NASA science teams including earth observing spacecraft and aircraft missions designed to measure the composition of the atmosphere.

Professor Noone's research takes him and his students around the world to investigate climate change: from the rainstorms over lush forests of New Guinea, equatorial oases of the Galapagos, desert mountain tops in Hawaii and the endless ice fields of Greenland. He delights in teaching weather and climate in the classroom, and on his field classes observing climate, but his preferred platform to observe wind and waves has a sail.

Refreshments will be served in the basement foyer of building 303 (303-B00L2) from 5:30pm, prior to the lecture.

An expert panel will discuss how they helped to engineer world-first quake-resilient buildings and structures, in an upcoming free UC Connect public talk on the evening of Wednesday 12 August.

The upcoming talk, UC Connect: Earthquakes + Innovation = Resilience will feature three revolutionary, award-winning UC academics – Distinguished Professor Geoff Chase, Professor Geoff Rodgers and Professor Alessandro Palermo. Each professor will highlight a different aspect of structural earthquake engineering advances made and lessons learnt, following the Canterbury earthquakes. Their talks will include an overview of some of the new resilient structures built using their novel solutions, such as state-of-the-art seismic dampers, and techniques, like in-silico “virtual buildings”, helping to engineer a more resilient future.

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The Youth19 Rangatahi Smart Survey (Youth19) is the latest in the Youth2000 series of health & wellbeing surveys.

Youth19 was conducted in 2019 in the Auckland, Northland & Waikato regions by researchers from The University of Auckland, Victoria University of Wellington, University of Otago & Auckland University of Technology.

Youth19 builds on previous Youth2000 surveys conducted by the Adolescent Health Research Group. Since 1999, the Youth2000 series has included over 36,000 young people in Aotearoa, with findings used widely to inform policy and practice, here and overseas. Youth19 combines core Youth2000 questions with a new focus on rangatahi wellbeing and, for the first time, direct access to digital help options for participants.

An overview of Youth19 findings will be released for the first time in person on Thursday 13 August at the Faculty of Education and Social Work.

This is a cross-school event, hosted by Learning Development and Professional Practice and Counselling Human Services and Social Work.

Speakers include:

Dr Terry Fleming, Victoria University of Wellington (Co-principal investigator)

Associate Professor Terryann Clark, The University of Auckland (Co-principal investigator)

Dr John Fenaughty, Dr Lara Graves, Dr Jemaima Tiatia-Seath and members of the Adolescent Health Research Group

Refreshments will follow the presentation and Q&A

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Bird curator Colin Miskelly has led four expeditions to southern Fiordland since 2016, all focused on seabird conservation.

These have included landings on 180 different islands between Doubtful Sound and Puysegur Point. In this talk, Colin will describe some of the highlights from these expeditions, including comparisons with what Captain Cook and his officers found in Dusky Sound in 1773, and changes in response to pioneering rat and stoat eradication successes since the 1980s. Colin’s most recent Fiordland trip, searching for nesting storm petrels on Secretary Island, was partially funded by the Friends of Te Papa.

To get a taste of Colin’s adventures check out this blog post he shared with us during lockdown. Colin’s talk will share rich details of his experiences and research, so we hope you’ll join us for what promises to be an intriguing hour of stories!

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"From embryos to organoids: harnessing stem cells to study disease"

Promotion to professor at the University of Auckland is a mark of distinction, recognising professional and academic eminence at an international level.

Please join us in celebrating Professor Alan Davidson's achievement at his inaugural lecture.

Abstract:

Stem cells offer great promise for new medical treatments because they act like a ‘fountain of youth’ to regenerate lost or damaged tissues. Amongst the most powerful of these are pluripotent stem cells, which resemble cells found in early embryos and can be ‘matured’ into all of the cell types of the body. Applying an understanding of embryonic processes to human pluripotent stem cells has led to the discovery that mini organs (organoids) can be grown and studied in the laboratory. This capability allows fundamental questions in human organ development and disease/injury to be investigated, as well as providing new ways to develop drugs. In the future, stem cell-derived tissues may even be used to regenerate damaged organs.

Professor Alan Davidson will share his success thus far with a personal story that reflects on his own ‘embryonic’ beginnings as a researcher and his contributions to the fields of kidney development and stem cell biology.

Biography:

Alan is the Head of the Department of Molecular Medicine & Pathology at the University of Auckland and uses kidney organoids, zebrafish and rats to study renal disease. Prior to returning to New Zealand in 2011 he was an Assistant Professor at the Center for Regenerative Medicine/Harvard Medical School (USA).

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An Association of Friends of the Otago Museum Talk

Penguins are an iconic and important part of New Zealand's bird assemblage, but did you know that they also have a long prehistoric record in New Zealand?

Bring your lunch and hear from Marcus Richards, University of Otago Department of Geology, as he discusses how the Otago region is a treasure trove for paleontologists wanting to understand the evolution of these wing-propelled divers, and conveniently there are modern species living on the coast allowing easy comparison.

Otago Museum holds some of the earliest collections made of near-complete skeletons of these ancient waterbirds. Revisiting these fossils collected a century ago, and in the recent wave of paleo-penguin research, we are learning so much more about the last 60 million years of this marine predator's lineage.

Marcus Richards was a previous recipient of the Otago Museum Taxonomy Fellowship fund for his work on penguin fossils.

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Abstract:

In her inaugural lecture, "The Accidental Academic” Professor Wall will share her career journey starting as a clinical dietitian in the UK and then stumbling into academia as a result of a passion for travel and some fortuitous encounters with exceptional people.

Biography:

Professor Clare Wall is Head of the Discipline of Nutrition and Dietetics and Academic Director of the School of Medical Sciences at the University of Auckland. Her research focuses on early life nutrition and she is currently the Principal Investigator of a research programme in Infant Health funded by the National Science Challenge – High Value Nutrition.

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Statistics is all about making sense of data. The ecological sciences are a statistician’s paradise, continually generating new types of data that need to be made sense of, due to a surge in innovative technologies for studying the populations and behaviour of wild animals.

Imagine if kiwi populations could be monitored simply by leaving microphone recorders in the forest for weeks, taking them back to base … and then what? Or if a few samples of DNA could reveal the launch pads of swimming rats invading sanctuary islands; or if whales could be monitored using photos from satellites? What has counting whales got to do with road traffic modelling? And how can New Zealand’s team of five million contribute to conservation analytics? Professor Fewster will give a taste of the diversity of statistical problems in the ecological domain, introduce a charismatic cast of creatures, and give insights into how we can – sometimes – convert baffling volumes of data into interpretable conclusions.

Rachel Fewster started life as a nature-mad youngster. After studying mathematics at Cambridge, she returned to nature with a PhD in statistical ecology at St Andrews. She moved to New Zealand for a two-year postdoc in 1999, and is somehow still here. She works in all aspects of ecological statistics, from applied to mathematical, and runs the citizen science project CatchIT involving several thousand members of the NZ public. She is also an enthusiastic educator, and won a national teaching excellence award in 2009.

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Date: Monday 24 August

Time: 4:30 pm - 6:30 pm

Location: 6EJ-103, University of Auckland, Epsom Campus.

The upcoming referendum on cannabis creates the need for public education. We are pleased to announce that Associate Professor Giles Newton-Howes from Otago University Medical School and the Clinical Head at Auckland Region Pain Service, Dr Tipu Aamir will deliver a seminar on August 24th at the Faculty of Education and Social Work, University of Auckland.

The seminar which will examine the relationship between health and cannabis, focusing on the potential mental health harms of increasing the potency and use of cannabis in New Zealand.

Giles Newton-Howes | Associate Professor, Otago University Medical School

Giles trained in psychiatry at Imperial College in London. He is a general adult consultant psychiatrist with a sub-specialty in substance misuse psychiatry. His research interests include the clinical understanding of personality disorders, particularly as they relate to psychiatric patients and mental state disorder. He is interested in the interface between psychiatry and society, particularly the application of coercive practices.

Tipu Aamir | Clinical Head, Auckland Regional Pain Service

Tipu trained initially in Psychiatry and then in Pain Medicine. He has been working as a Pain Medicine Specialist for The Auckland Regional Pain Service and is currently the Clinical Head of the department. He is actively involved in teaching pain medicine to undergraduate medical students as well as postgraduate students. He is the elected Chairperson of New Zealand National Committee for Faculty of Pain Medicine, Australian and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists.

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