The O-Zone Group
Founded in early 2007, the O-Zone group comprises early to mid-career researchers who have been recognized by the University of Otago for their significant contributions to their fields. O-Zone members are winners of either an Early Career Award for Distinction in Research, or the prestigious Rowheath Trust Award and Carl Smith Medal.
The group exemplifies the University of Otago’s national and international leadership by including world-class researchers across the entire spectrum of disciplines––science, medical science, social science, humanities, and the arts.
The O-Zone group undertakes activities to promote interdisciplinary thinking and collaborations and to present a positive, clear, innovative, and independent voice for research within the university, locally, regionally, and nationally. The main goals of the group are:
1. To advocate for and promote research:
- Within the University of Otago;
- To the broader New Zealand government, industry, and research sectors;
- To the New Zealand public.
2. To facilitate networking and collaborations among early to mid-career researchers at University of Otago.
The activities of the O-Zone group are driven by the belief that world-leading research and the benefits it accrues to New Zealand are fundamentally driven by the range of disciplines and the mix of pure and applied research represented by its members.
O-Zone membership is normally for five years. Convenership is generally rotated biennially. The convener of the O-Zone group sits on the University of Otago Research Committee.
Check out the Science Lecture podcasts
Contacts
Dr Guy Jameson
Co-Convenor
Tel 64 3 479 8028
gjameson@chemistry.otago.ac.nz
Dr Simone Marshall
Co-Convenor
Tel 64 3 479 4850
simone.marshall@otago.ac.nz
Liz Owen
Administrative contact
Tel 64 3 479 8835
liz.owen@otago.ac.nz
Current O-Zone Members
Dr Mikkel Andersen
Email mikkel@physics.otago.ac.nz
Department Physics
Michael Black
Mik received a BSc (Hons) in Statistics in 1997 from the University of Canterbury, and a MS (Mathematical Statistics, 2000) and PhD (Statistics, 2002) from Purdue University. Mik’s research focuses on the development and application of statistical methods for the analysis of data from genomics experiments, with a particular emphasis on colorectal and breast cancer. Mik is also involved in the provision of grid-based computing tools for the NZ bioscience community via BeSTGRID, and the development of a national genomics infrastructure through New Zealand Genomics Ltd (NZGL).
Email mik.black@stonebow.otago.ac.nz
Department Biochemistry
Dr Rachel Brown
Email rachel.brown@otago.ac.nz
Department Human Nutrition
Rebecca Campbell
Rebecca is interested in defining how the gonadotrophin releasing hormone (GnRH) neurons, well established as the ultimate downstream regulators of the central control of reproductive function, are regulated by the multitude of external and internal cues necessary for successful fertility. She is investigating the synaptic regulation of GnRH neurons, with particular emphasis on the innervation to their lengthy dendrites, through a variety of morphological imaging and transgenic mouse model approaches. In addition to understanding the regulation of normal fertility, Rebecca is also interested in addressing the central neuroendocrine abnormalities of polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS), the leading cause of infertility in women.
Email rebecca.campbell@otago.ac.nz
Department Dunedin School of Medicine
Dr James Crowley
Email jcrowley@chemistry.otago.ac.nz
Department Chemistry
Fiona Edgar
Fiona's current research portfolio contains several strands. Her current research agenda explores the relationship between HRM practice and performance outcomes. The impact of culture, along with inclusion of the employee perspective on HRM is included in this research. A second research area looks at employment relations ideologies. This research explores the underpinning values and beliefs held by managers and employers in relation to HRM, and it encompasses both a national and international perspective.
Email fiona.edgar@otago.ac.nz
Department Management
Dr Peter Fineran
Dr Peter Fineran is a Senior Lecturer in Molecular Microbiology in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology. After completing his BSc (Hons) in Biochemistry at the University of Canterbury (2001) he worked at the Australian National University. He conducted his PhD (2006) and postdoctoral research training at the University of Cambridge, UK. In 2008 he established a research group at Otago focusing on bacterial gene regulation and the interactions between bacteria and their viruses (bacteriophages). His research utilises molecular genetics and biochemistry to investigate how bacteria control their gene expression including how they respond to infection by bacteriophages.
Email peter.fineran@otago.ac.nz
Department Microbiology and Immunology
Richard Gearry
Dr Richard Gearry is Associate Professor at the Department of Medicine, University of Otago, Christchurch and a Consultant Gastroenterologist at Christchurch Hospital. He has an active research interest in luminal gastroenterology including inflammatory bowel disease, coeliac disease, colorectal cancer and irritable bowel syndrome. His research spans epidemiology, clinical outcomes, genetics and mechanisms of disease. Dr Gearry is involved in undergraduate medical student teaching as well as the supervision of a number of post-graduate students. He collaborates closely with the Free Radical Research Group, Department of Surgery and Clinical Pharmacology in Christchurch. He is also the Medical Director of the New Zealand Nutrition Foundation, Trustee of the Bowel and Liver Trust, Canterbury and has an advisory role to Crohn's and Colitis New Zealand.
Email richard.gearry@cdhb.health.nz
Department Medicine, University of Otago, Christchurch
Dr Dione Healey
Dione Healey completed her studies at the University of Canterbury in 2006, after which she spent two years as a post-doctoral fellow in New York working on Distinguished Professor Jeffrey Halperin’s longitudinal study of children with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). She took up a position as lecturer in clinical psychology at the University of Otago in 2008 and was promoted to senior lecturer in 2010. She and has received two University of Otago Research Grants (2009 & 2010), and in 2011 she was awarded the New Zealand Psychological Society’s Goddard Early Career Award for Achievement and Excellence in Research and Scholarship. Dione’s current research focuses on the development of an early-intervention for hyperactive preschoolers, called ENGAGE (Enhancing Neurocognitve Growth with the Aid of Games and Exercise). The intervention involves teaching self-regulation skills to preschoolers through the use of prescribed games that parents and children play for half an hour a day. Current treatments for ADHD (i.e., medication and behaviour management training) externally regulate children’s behaviour and while effective during active treatment, the symptoms return when treatment desists. Dione hopes that by teaching internal self-regulatory skills to children they will learn to manage their own symptoms, which will lead to better maintenance of treatment gains over time.
Email Dione.Healey@otago.ac.nz
Department Psychology
Anne-Louise Heath
Anne-Louise is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Human Nutrition. Her areas of research interest are iron nutrition, infant nutrition, and the use of food-based strategies to improve micronutrient status.
Anne-Louise has a BA(Hons), BSc(Hons) and PhD (1999) from the University of Otago. Her Health Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship was with Professor Susan Fairweather-Tait at the Institute of Food Research (Norwich, UK). Recent projects include the Toddler Food Study investigating the efficacy of dietary interventions for preventing the development of iron and other micronutrient deficiencies in toddlers, and the IREN study investigating iron supplementation practices in elite athletes. Anne-Louise is currently involved in a major intervention study to prevent the development of overweight in infancy, the POI study; and in the New Zealand Adult Nutrition Survey 2008/09.
Email anne-louise.heath@otago.ac.nz
Department Human Nutrition
Julia Horsfield
Julia Horsfield is a senior lecturer in the Department of Pathology. Her research group valiantly seeks to understand the contribution of chromatin structure to gene expression, animal development and cancer. Favourite model animal? The zebrafish...
Email julia.horsfield@otago.ac.nz
Department Pathology
Guy Jameson
Guy Jameson is a lecturer in the Chemistry Department where he undertakes research in Biophysical Chemistry. His overarching research interest is the chemistry of Parkinson’s disease and the elucidation of this through mechanistic and spectroscopic investigations. Currently his major focus is cysteine metabolism and specifically the mechanism of the enzyme cysteine dioxygenase, a non-heme mono-iron enzyme. His research is funded through grants from Marsden, HRC and FRST. Guy is an associate investigator in the MacDiarmird Institute and runs the Institute’s Mössbauer spectrometer, the only one of its type in New Zealand, and collaborates with groups around the world studying magnetic materials and coordination complexes as well as enzyme systems. He is currently a member of the PCB panel for the Marsden Fund.
Email gjameson@chemistry.otago.ac.nz
Department Chemistry
Christine Jasoni
Christine Jasoni is a Sr Lecturer in the Department of Anatomy & Structural Biology. Christine is motivated by a desire to improve human health and well-being, and her research thus focuses on – 1.) understanding how maternal health affects foetal brain development to presdispose children to behavioural disorders; 2.) recapitulating developmental axon growth and wiring strategies in order to repair the brain after stroke. Christine’s research benefits from collaborations locally - through membership in the Centre for Neuroendocrinology, the Brain Health and Repair Research Centre, Genetics Otago – nationally - through membership in the National Research Centre for Growth and Development, and internationally. Christine is committed to collaborative science, as it is key to realizing the common goals of improved health and quality of life for all New Zealanders, and forms the cornerstone of internationally competitive NZ science.
In addition to being passionate about research, Christine is dedicated to improving public understanding and awareness of science, and to facilitating communication with government to ensure scientific discoveries benefit New Zealand. Christine achieves these goals primarily through her involvement in the Otago Institute, a regional branch of the Royal Society of New Zealand, Genetics Otago, the National Research Centre for Growth and Development, and the OZone group.
Email christine.jasoni@otago.ac.nz
Department Anatomy
Dr Jevon Longdell
Email jevon@physics.otago.ac.nz
Department Physics
Simone Marshall
Dr Simone Celine Marshall is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English, where she researches medieval literature. In 2010, Simone made a major discovery of a previously unknown 1807 edition of The Poetical Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, one of the seminal poets of the Middle Ages. The discovery fundamentally changes scholarly perceptions of how the works of Chaucer were understood in previous eras, and significantly alters how modern scholars today view the poet’s literature.
Simone is currently engaged in a Marsden-funded research project concerning the nature of anonymity in medieval literature, a project intended as a model for future research into anonymous literatures of other languages and time periods. The project enhances scholarly knowledge about authorship and canon formation by showing that medieval anonymity contributes to a tradition extending through to contemporary literature.
Simone is also an associate investigator on another Marsden-funded research project entitled The “Machinery of Transcendence”: Unattended moments in the Modernist Tradition. The project investigates the substantial medieval presence within the Modernist aesthetic (1900-1960).
Email simone.marshall@otago.ac.nz
Department English
Dr Shinichi Nakagawa
Shinichi has been a lecturer and now senior lecturer at the Department of Zoology, University of Otago since 2008. He obtained his BSc(Hons) at University of Waikato in 2003 and then gained his PhD at University of Sheffield, UK in 2007. His core research interest is the fields of behavioural sciences and evolutionary biology, but his interests are diverse. His group (www.sparrow.otago.ac.nz) has five different research themes: 1) behavioural & evolutionary ecology, 2) evolutionary genetics & endocrinology, 3) behavioural neuroscience, 4) nutritional ecology & evolutionary gerontology and 5) statistical computational biology. His research has been funded by grants from University of Otago, Marsden and NRCGD (National Research Centre for Growth and Development). He is particularly interested in bringing and bridging different disciplines for new research topics.
Email Shinichi.Nakagawa@otago.ac.nz
Department Zoology
Jessica Palmer
Jessica is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Law. Jessica’s main research interest has been in the field of equity, an area of law that concerns trusts and doctrines based on the prevention of unconscionable conduct. Her most recent research has been on beneficiaries’ rights and avenues available to non-beneficiaries to access trust property. She has publications in a number of high calibre national and international legal journals and her work is regularly cited by both overseas and New Zealand academics. She has also been cited in at least three judgments in New Zealand, including a decision of the Court of Appeal in 2008 concerning sham trusts. She speaks regularly at national law conferences and is a member of the New Zealand Law Commission’s reference panel for its current review of the law of trusts.
Email jessica.palmer@otago.ac.nz
Department Law
Rebecca Roberts
Rebecca’s primary area of research is the identification and characterisation of genes that alter susceptibility to chronic inflammatory diseases (e.g. Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, ankylosing spondylitis, rheumatoid arthritis) and the response to drugs used to manage these diseases. Although not usually life-threatening these conditions are associated with significant morbidity and since the 1950s there has been an exponential increase in the incidence of inflammatory diseases in North America, Western Europe, and Australasia. The exact causes of these diseases remain unknown, as is a cure. By gaining a better understanding of the genes involved in these diseases it is hoped that we will identify the initial ‘triggers’ and in doing so develop effective intervention and treatment strategies.
Rebecca is currently funded by a Sir Charles Hercus Health Research Fellowship (Health Research Council, HRC) and is the principal investigator on a HRC project grant investigating novel genetic risk factors for inflammatory bowel disease, a project part of a wider HRC program exploring the application of genetics to uncover shared inflammatory pathways in common chronic diseases.
Email rebecca.roberts@otago.ac.nz
Department Biochemistry
Lisa Stamp
Assoc Prof Lisa Stamp is a Rheumatologist at the University of Otago, Christchurch and Christchurch Public Hospital. Assoc Prof Stamp has an active research interest in a variety of areas including role of interleukin-17 in rheumatoid arthritis and individualization of drug treatments in rheumatic conditions. This has included the use of methotrexate in rheumatoid arthritis and the role of intracellular methotrexate polyglutamates in disease activity and drug toxicity, measurement of thiopurine metabolites in RA and dosing of allopurinol and the role of oxypurinol concentrations in gout.
Dr Stamp works closely with The Leukocyte Inflammation Research Laboratory in Dunedin and Clinical Pharmacology in Christchurch. In addition she has collaborations via the New Zealand Rheumatology Research Network. She is a member of the international group OMERACT gout special interest group.
Email lisa.stamp@cdhb.govt.nz
Department Department of Medicine, University of Otago, Christchurch
Dr Clare Strachan
Clare Strachan is a senior lecturer at the University since 2009. She gained her BPharm and PhD from Otago, and subsequently spent four years at the University of Helsinki in Finland, initially as a postdoctoral researcher and then as a group leader at the Centre for Drug Research.
Her research focuses on analysing medicine formulations (e.g tablets, capsules) during manufacturing, storage and after administration with the aim of improving therapeutic responses and safety profiles. Her analytical work combines the disciplines of physics, chemistry and pharmacy, and she collaborates with a number of research groups around the world.
She has published 56 articles in a wide range of scientific journals and her work is widely cited. She been an invited speaker at a number of conferences in North America, Europe and Asia, and currently supervises seven PhD researchers, with previous PhD researchers receiving international awards for their doctoral work.
Email Clare.strachan@otago.ac.nz
Department Pharmacy
Anna Thompson
Anna’s research and publications focus on the interweaving fields of sustainable eco tourism, adventure tourism, wilderness management, recreation, cultural landscapes and community development. She was awarded a University of Otago Early Career Award for Distinction in Research (2007). She is co-director of the School of Business’ Centre for Recreation Research and member of the NZ Mountain Safety Council National Research Committee. She has led research consultancies for the Department of Conservation and in 2008 Anna received SPARC funding to research families’ experiences of the New Zealand outdoor environment.
Email anna.thompson@otago.ac.nz
Department: Tourism
Richard Troughton
Richard is a cardiologist and associate professor in medicine at the UOC. He is a clinical researcher with the Cardioendocrine research group. His research interests are related to neurohumoral control of the circulation, novel techniques for monitoring heart failure and cardiac imaging. He has active links with collaborators in the US, including at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation where he undertook post-graduate research and clinical training.
Email richard.troughton@cdhb.govt.nz
Department Department of Medicine, University of Otago, Christchurch
Dr Shieak Tzeng
Dr Shieak Tzeng is a Lecturer in Clinical Physiology in the Department of Surgery & Anaesthesia at the University of Otago, Wellington. In 2006, he graduated from the University with the degrees MB ChB and a PhD. In 2007 he was awarded a first-equal placing in the Advancing Human Health and Wellbeing category of the MacDiarmid Young Scientist of the Year Awards. Since then he has also gained a National Heart Foundation Research Fellowship, a Health Research Council Emerging Researchers First Grant and an AMP Scholarship to further his post-doctoral training at Harvard Medical School’s Cardiovascular Research Laboratory. He currently holds a prestigious Sir Charles Hercus Health Research Fellowship.
Dr Tzeng’s research interests involve understanding the haemodynamic changes underpinning disease processes such as hypertension, stroke, and syncope. He has pioneered work demonstrating intimate physiological links between blood pressure and cerebral blood flow control mechanisms that may be targets for stroke treatments. Dr Tzeng is also involved in the undergraduate medical student teaching and is currently developing a vertical integration physiology program for clinical medical students in the Wellington campus.
Email Shieak.Tzeng@otago.ac.nz
Department Surgery and Anaesthesia, University of Otago, Wellington
Angela Wanhalla
Angela’s research focuses on gender, race and colonialism in nineteenth century New Zealand, the indigenous history of the North American West, and the history of intimacy, focusing on interracial relationships and hybridity.
Email angela.wanhalla@otago.ac.nz
Department History and Art History
Pat Wheatley
Ancient Historian Pat Wheatley received his PhD with Distinction from the University of Western Australia in 1998, and lectured at the University of Queensland before coming to Otago in 2004. His research specialty is the history and historiography of the Successors to Alexander the Great. He has published articles on the chronology, coinage, and social aspects of this period, and convened two international Alexander the Great conferences since his arrival. He is also Australasian editor of the journal Ancient History Bulletin.
He is currently working on three books: a Commentary on Justin, a fragmentary Latin text; a Festschrift for his former doctoral supervisor, Professor Brian Bosworth; and a historical biography of Demetrius Poliorcetes, the highest profile Successor to Alexander the Great. No extended treatment of Demetrius’ life has yet been published, despite his pervasive impact on four major world empires.
Email pat.wheatley@otago.ac.nz
Department Classics
Sarah Young
Sarah is a Senior Lecturer in the Pathology Dept, Dunedin School of Medicine. She gained her PhD in Immunology in 2000 and subsequently worked for the Imperial Cancer Research Fund and Cancer Research UK, before returning to New Zealand. Her research focuses on the development of immune therapies for cancer, including the development of new vaccines and cell-based therapies. Together with her collaborators at Otago she has been successful in gaining over $10 million in research funds in the last 5 years. Dr Young maintains several collaborations nationally as well as ongoing international collaborations with researchers at Cancer Research UK, Oxford University, QUT, and the Mayo Clinic in the USA. Dr Young is also a member of the Lotteries Health Assessing Committee. In 2008 was awarded the prestigious Sir Charles Hercus Fellowship by the Health Research Council.
Email sarah.young@otago.ac.nz
Department Pathology
Past Members of the O-Zone Group
Philip Ainslie
Department Physiology
Boris Baeumer
Boris Baeumer has been a senior lecturer in the Department of Mathematics & Statistics at the University of Otago since 2004. His expertise is in applied mathematics focusing on movement of particles or organisms in nature that do not adhere to classical theories. He obtained his Ph.D. in pure mathematics from Louisiana State University, USA in 1997, moved in to applied mathematics during a post-doctoral fellowship in hydrology at the University of Nevada, Reno and was appointed lecturer at the University of Otago in 2001. He was awarded the Early Career Award for Distinction in Research by the University of Otago in 2005 and his research on Transport in Fractal Media was supported by the Royal Society of New Zealand through their Marsden Faststart funding scheme during 2004-2005. He has given invited addresses at international conferences and published over 35 scientific articles not just in mathematical journals but also in physics, geophysics, and hydrology. He is a council member of the New Zealand Mathematical Society as well as a council member of the New Zealand branch of ANZIAM (Australia and New Zealand Industrial and Applied Mathematics). He is also involved in popularising science as council member of the Otago Institute, the Otago branch of the Royal Society of New Zealand.
Email boris.baeumer@otago.ac.nz
Department Maths
Blair Blakie
Email blair.blakie@otago.ac.nz
Department Physics
Gregory Cook
Email gregory.cook@otago.ac.nz
Department Microbiology
Catherine Day
Email catherine.day@otago.ac.nz
Department Biochemistry
Peter Dearden
Peter's research programme aims to understand how genes work together to shape the bodies of animals while they are embryos, and how those genes have changed over evolutionary time to give use the wonderful diversity of animals we see around us. His work focusses on insects, such as honeybees, fruit flies and aphids, and a tine marine animal called a rotifer. Peter is also interesting in studying reproduction in honeybees and developing novel, environmentally friendly, insecticides.
Email peter.dearden@otago.ac.nz
Department Biochemistry
Jacob Edmond
Dr Jacob Edmond is a senior lecturer in the Department of English. He came to Otago in 2004 after spending a postdoctoral year as a Fulbright visiting scholar in the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. In 2005 he was awarded a Marsden Fast-Start Grant, and in 2006 he received an Early Career Award for Distinction in Research, becoming a member of the O-Zone group at its inception in 2007. Dr Edmond has published on cross-cultural encounter, comparative literature, generic and inter-art boundary-crossing, and avant-garde poetics, focusing on poetry in Russian, Chinese, and English. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in leading international journals, including Comparative Literature, Contemporary Literature, Poetics Today, The China Quarterly, and the Slavic and East European Journal. He has also edited special issues of the New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies and Landfall (on Russia), and edited and translated, with Hilary Chung, Yang Lian’s Unreal City: A Chinese Poet in Auckland (Auckland UP). He has recently completed a book manuscript on contemporary poetry, cross-cultural encounter, and comparative literature.
Email jacob.edmond@otago.ac.nz
Department English
Andrew Geddis
Email andrew.geddis@otago.ac.nz
Department Law
Jamin Halberstadt
Email jamin.halberstadt@otago.ac.nz
Department Psychology
Mark Hampton
Email mark.hampton@otago.ac.nz
Department Pathology
David Hutchinson
David is an Associate Professor in the Department of Physics. He was the inaugural winner of the Carl Smith Medal and Rowheath Trust Award and convened the O-Zone Group from 2008-2010. His research is predominantly in the field of theoretical ultra-cold atomic physics (an area in which he has held two Marsden contracts), although his original background is in more traditional condensed matter physics - his PhD from Exeter University was concerned with strongly correlated electron system and, in particular, the fractional quantum Hall effect. Between leaving Exeter in 1994 and arriving at Otago in 2000 he held postdoctoral positions at Dublin City University (in plasma physics) and Queen's University, Canada (semiconductor quantum dots, then Bose-Einstein condensation), followed by three years as Lecturer in Physics at Somerville College, Oxford University. More recently, while on RSL from the University, he was an Associé Directeur de Recherche of the C. N. R. S. and Professor Invité at the Ecole Normale Sùperieur in Paris.
Email david.hutchinson@otago.ac.nz
Department Physics
Alexander McLellan
Dr Alex McLellan is a senior lecturer in the Dept. of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Otago (Dunedin, NZ) and leads a research group studying the interaction of pathogens and cancer with the body's immune system.
Dr McLellan gained a PhD from the University of Otago. In 1998, Dr McLellan took up a Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Dermatology at the University of Würzburg, Germany. Since his return to The University of Otago in 2003, he has built working collaborations with several local groups and is director of the Otago Flow Cytometry Facility, a facility used by around 100 researchers. He is active in several areas of immunology, including exosome biology, cancer immunotherapy and diagnostic development, including the identification of biomarkers for renal transplant rejection.
Dr McLellan is a mentor for undergraduate and postgraduate students and teaches students at all levels, including University of Otago courses in Immunology & Microbiology, the Health Sciences First Year and Pharmacy, as well as community- based education for Continuing Education and The University of the Third Age.
Email alex.mclellan@otago.ac.nz
Department Microbiology
Karen Nairn
Dr. Karen Nairn is a senior lecturer in the University of Otago College of Education, New Zealand. Her research is interdisciplinary in nature with contributions to education, youth studies, geography education and the wider field of qualitative research.
She was the Principal Investigator (with Dr Jane Higgins, Lincoln University) of a successfully completed three-year Marsden funded project ‘In transition’: How the children of New Zealand’s neo-liberal reforms articulate identities at the child/adult border. This project examined the post high school transitions of 93 young people born since the wide-ranging economic, education and social reforms introduced in 1984, often referred to as ‘Rogernomics’. This research on New Zealand’s ‘children of Rogernomics’ parallels research on ‘Thatcher’s children’, who grew up during Britain’s neoliberal reforms.
Email karen.nairn@otago.ac.nz
Department Education
Jing-Bao Nie
Jing-Bao Nie is Associate Professor in Bioethics Centre, Dunedin School of Medicine, and honorary adjunct professor at Peking University, China. He has published nearly eighty journal articles and book chapters, including three chapters in The Cambridge World History of Medical Ethics (Cambridge UP, 2009). His books include Behind the Silence: Chinese Voices on Abortion (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), Medical Ethics in China: A Cross-Cultural Interpretation (Georgetown UP, forthcoming) and Japan’s Wartime Medical Atrocities: Comparative Inquiries in Science, History, and Ethics (Routledge, 2010). His current Marsden Fund grant project is on the ideologies and ethics of China’s birth control programme.
Email jing-bao.nie@otago.ac.nz
Department Medical and Surgical Sciences
John Reynolds
John Reynolds is a Senior Lecturer in Neuroscience in the Dept of Anatomy and Structural Biology. He heads a laboratory which forms part of the Basal Ganglia Research Group at Otago. His team uses a variety of anatomical and physiological techniques to study the functioning of brain areas affected in neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s and Huntington’s diseases. John graduated from Otago with a Medical degree in 1994 and a PhD in Neuroscience in 2000. He received an international Brain Research Young Investigator Award (2004) for his work on rare brain cells which produce the neurochemical acetylcholine, and was the recipient of a University of Otago Early Career Award for Distinction in Research (2005).
Email john.reynolds@otago.ac.nz
Department Anatomy
Craig Rodger
Craig is interested in the coupling of the Sun to the space environment around the Earth and the changes driven in Earth's atmosphere. His research activities involve the use of radio waves to sense lightning, the upper atmosphere and near-Earth space. He is particularly interested in the impact of hot particles which crash into the Earth's atmosphere, driven from storms which originate from the Sun.
Craig collaborates with researchers from around the globe through the World Wide Lightning Location Network (WWLLN), and the joint NZ-UK lead Antarctic-Arctic Radiation-belt (Dynamic) Deposition - VLF Atmospheric Research Konsortia (AARDDVARK).
Email crodger@physics.otago.ac.nz
Department Physics
Jacinta Ruru
Email jacinta.ruru@otago.ac.nz
Department Law
Takashi Shogimen
A Senior Lecturer in History, Takashi specializes in the political thought of medieval Europe, with special attention to the making of modern political thinking. His current project, which has been supported by the Marsden Fund (Standard) since 2008, is a study of medieval theories of peace. He has also been exploring a cross-cultural approach to the historical studies of political ideas, by examining the impact of medicine on discourses of the body politic in medieval Europe and Tokugawa Japan. His publications include Ockham and Political Discourse in the Late Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and Western Political Thought in Dialogue with Asia (Lexington Books/Rowman and Littlefield, 2008) co-edited with Cary J. Nederman.
Email takashi.shogimen@otago.ac.nz
Department History and Art History
Jonathan Waters
Jon is an evolutionary biologist specialising in the analysis of genetic variation in a spatial context. His research group’s recent aDNA work on yellow-eyed penguins has uncovered dramatic temporal shifts in the spatial distribution of prehistoric and modern lineages. More broadly, he is perhaps best known for his research highlighting the tight evolutionary relationships between rivers and their biotas. Current research projects in his laboratory focus on the role of climate change and human impacts in shaping Southern Hemisphere marine biodiversity.
Email jonathan.waters@otago.ac.nz
Department: Zoology
Lisa Whitehead
Email lisa.whitehead@otago.ac.nz
Department Postgraduate Nursing Studies
