Advisory Group
Postdoctoral fellowships

The members of the advisory group who will assess the concepts and proposals for the Postdoctoral Fellowship investment process are listed below.

Name	Background
Dr Des Darby, Chair	General Manager Strategy, at GNS Science. Des has a PhD in physics from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Des's scientific specialty is the mathematical modelling of geodetic observations of the surficial deformation of the Earth's crust, in order to derive information about the present-day behaviour of deeper geological structures. This knowledge, now based mainly on GPS satellite observations, contributes to the assessment of geological hazards, such as earthquakes, volcanoes, landslides and tsunami. As a former Section Manager and Programme Leader, from 1990 to 2000, he led the major research programme on The Effects of Plate Tectonics on New Zealand, and managed GNS's crustal dynamics team of geophysicists and geologists. He now leads GNS Science's strategy formation, for both research and consultancy, across both the government and the private sectors, and advises the Chief Executive in these areas. Des is also an establishment Board Member of the New Zealand Synchrotron Group Ltd.
Prof Ian Evans	Ian Evans is Professor of Psychology at Massey University, based on the Wellington campus. His PhD was from London University (Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College) and he has taught at the University of Hawaii, the State University of New York at Binghamton, and the University of Waikato. His areas of interest are clinical psychology, specifically behaviour therapy and the application of basic learning and conditioning principles to assessment, treatment and rehabilitation of people with disabilities. He is currently working on a Marsden-funded study investigating the emotional climate of the classroom and his lab group are involved in a variety of projects looking at the influence of emotion-rich environments on behaviour and development. Ian is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand and of the Association for Psychological Science (USA).
Dr Liz Wedderburn	Dr Liz Wedderburn is the section manager for Land and Environmental Management, AgResearch based at the Ruakura campus Hamilton. Liz came to New Zealand from Scotland in 1982 and has spent her career in sustainable agriculture initially as a pasture ecologist in South Island High Country and North Island Hill country. Over the last 15 years her attention has turned to understanding the impact of farming practice on off site emissions and on site quality. Balancing multiple goals from land management requires a knowledge of what farmers as individuals are attempting to attain and the contribution agriculture makes to community well being. Liz is involved in research that will enable a closer understanding of how to align agriculture contribution with community requirements and making transparent the choices that will have to be made so that we can look forward to sustainable futures.
Dr Geoffrey Chase	Dr. J. Geoffrey Chase is an Associate Professor in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Canterbury. A graduate of Case Western Reserve University (BS) and Stanford University (MS, PhD) he spent six years working for General Motors between various degrees and a further five years as a consulting engineer and doing research in Silicon Valley, including positions at Xerox PARC, GN ReSound and Infineon Technologies AG, before taking his current position at the University of Canterbury in 2000. His research specialties include the NZ Health Innovation Supreme Award winning, and IPENZ Design Award winning, blood glucose and metabolic control systems, as well as several other applications of dynamic systems modeling, computation, control, and monitoring for diverse applications across critical care and general medicine. Dr Chase is also involved in significant research for similar technological applications in earthquake and structural engineering. Dr Chase has been involved with over 220 international, peer-reviewed journal and conference papers in these areas, and is an inventor on 8 patents.
Professor John Grundy	John Grundy is Professor of Software Engineering at the University of Auckland. His research interests include software tools and methods, software architecture, service-oriented architectures, user interfaces and domain -specific visual languages and environments. He has supervised nearly 30 PhD and Masters students, over 30 undergraduate and graduate project students, has been a principle investigator on several Foundation? NERF?, RFI? and PGSF projects, and a lead research provider for several Technology New Zealand TBG? projects. Professor Grundy works with a wide range of New Zealand companies on applied research and development projects and numerous international research groups on a wide range of basic and applied research in software engineering.
Professor Robert Aldred	Born in Melbourne Australia, Robert completed his education (B.Sc (hons), M.Sc. and Ph.D., all in Mathematics) at the University of Melbourne although much of the research for his Ph.D. was undertaken at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver and his thesis was composed at the University of Otago in 1986. After eighteen months as Beverly Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Otago, Robert took a position as Assistant Professor in Southern Illinois. In 1989 Robert returned to Otago as a lecturer in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics and has remained there ever since, attaining the rank of Associate Professor. An active researcher in Graph Theory and Combinatorics with more than 60 refereed research publications to date, he maintains close links with international colleagues in Australia, Asia, Europe and North America and has been a visiting research fellow at universities in Australia, Thailand, Japan, Scotland, Denmark and the United States. A Foundation Fellow of the Institute of Combinatorics and Its Applications and recipient of the Nihon University Medal, he is also an editor of the Journal of Combinatorial Mathematics and Combinatorial Computing and managing editor of the Electronic Journal of Combinatorics.
Professor Alan Kaiser	Alan Kaiser is a Professor of Physics in the School of Chemical and Physical Sciences, Victoria University of Wellington, and a Principal Investigator of the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology. He has a PhD in Physics from the Imperial College of Science and Technology, University of London, and an MSc in Radiophysics and a BA in Economics from Victoria University of Wellington. He was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Max-Planck-Institut für Festkörperforschung, Stuttgart, Germany, and a Research Assistant at the W.W. Hansen Laboratories, Department of Applied Physics, Stanford University, U.S.A. His main research interest is the electronic properties of novel materials, including carbon nanotubes and other nanoscale materials, conducting polymers, superconductors and glassy metals. He has collaborated and published with overseas researchers in Korea, Germany, U.S.A., U.K., Australia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Israel, Poland, Hungary and Egypt. Alan was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand in 1998.
Dr Sarah Young	Dr Sarah Young completed her BSc (Hons) and PhD at Otago University. Her main area of research during this time was improving the current vaccine against tuberculosis. She then took up a postdoctoral position with the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in the UK, investigating the use of these vaccines as tumour immunotherapies. Following this she did a second postdoc in the UK, at St. James's University hospital in Leeds. At this clinical research centre, part of Cancer Research UK, she undertook study in the use of exosomes as immunotherapies and vaccines against cancer. In 2003, Sarah returned to NZ and took up a Fellowship in the Dept of Microbiology and Immunology, at the University of Otago. Since then she has combined her knowledge in infectious disease and tumour immunology to concentrate on developing new and novel vaccines for infectious disease and cancer. Current funding from the HRC, Cancer Society of NZ and Lotteries supports this work. Sarah collaborates with other researchers in NZ and Australia, as well as the USA and the UK. In 2007 Sarah was awarded the Otago School of Medical Sciences Young Investigator of the Year.
Dr Steve Davis	Currently a Senior Scientist with ViaLactia Biosciences (NZ) Ltd., a subsidiary of Fonterra. Steve gained his Ph.D in animal physiology from the University of Nottingham and joined the staff at Ruakura Research Centre (then part of MAF) in 1977. His research interests have centred around mammary gland biology and metabolism in the dairy cow. Notably, this work included several studies on endocrine regulation of the lactating gland and also the genetic regulation of lactation in relation to milking frequency. He was responsible for building a significant research programme in lactation physiology at AgResearch, Ruakura through the early 90’s. This became part of a larger Dairy Science Group which he led from its inception in 1994 through its first two years. Steve provides lectures as part of two mammalian physiology courses at the University of Waikato and has co-supervised several postgraduate students at Massey, Waikato and Auckland universities. In 2003, Steve left Ruakura and joined the bovine gene discovery programme (boviQuest) run jointly by Fonterra through ViaLactia in Auckland and LIC in Hamilton. Much of this work is now focussed on understanding genes that regulate bovine milk composition and finding genetic variations of commercial value.