KEY POINTS:
Research projects investigating false witness identification and the stability of the South Island's Alpine Fault are two of the 93 new studies to win grants from the Marsden Fund.
Totalling $44 million, the investments are aimed at advancing leading-edge New Zealand research in the sciences, engineering, maths and information sciences, social sciences and the humanities.
Just under a third of the awards (28) are Marsden Fast-Starts, designed to support outstanding researchers early in their careers.
Dr Garth Carnaby, Chair of the Marsden Fund Council, was delighted with the outcome, saying, "All of the projects funded are in the top five per cent of research activity internationally. Marsden invests in New Zealand's brightest and best, enabling them to explore their ideas, and contribute to innovation and development in our society, and in the research community globally."
Two of the funding recipients' research projects will scrutinise the South Island's Alpine Fault, an area thought to be long overdue for major earthquake.
Very little is known about how and why catastrophic quakes occur on faults like the one that runs through New Zealand's major plate boundary in the Southern Alps.
A team lead by Professor Tim Stern from the Institute of Geophysics and School of Earth Sciences at Victoria University will place seismographs up to 250 metres underground to record quakes along the central section of the fault. These will record earthquakes one hundred times smaller than the ones GeoNet - New Zealand's quake monitoring network - can detect.
By analysing the tiny tremors that happen everyday along the Alpine Fault, the researchers will be able to study the rupture processes of earthquakes.
Meanwhile, Dr Kelvin Berryman and colleagues from GNS Science, together with an international team of experts, have received a Marsden grant to investigate whether the Alpine Fault ruptures at regular intervals, or whether the quakes come in clusters.
The team will examine evidence of up to 25 earthquakes from the past 7000 years preserved in South Westland lake sediments. Geological records of this quality are rare worldwide.
Fast-Start Marsden Grant recipient Dr Rachel Zajac of the University of Otago will put her $170,000 towards investigating how false witness identification can be reduced.
Although photographic line-ups are a commonly-used technique in identifying criminals, false eyewitness identification is also the leading cause of all wrongful convictions to date.
A previous study found that false identifications decreased dramatically when children were given the opportunity to point to an additional photograph depicting a silhouetted figure with a question mark superimposed, rather than verbally identifying a person in a line-up.
Dr Zajac's research aims to recreate that study with adults to establish whether the same technique is effective with older people.
The influence of factors such as the age of the witness, the physical characteristics of the target, and the delay between seeing the perpetrator and identifying them will also be investigated.
Dr Carnaby said a recent $2.25 million budget boost from the Government had enabled the Marsden Fund Council to seed fund a number of projects it would have been impossible to support otherwise.
"This investment by the Government is crucial - it enables New Zealand based researchers and scientists to engage with the international discovery frontier. It is also particularly pleasing that we were able to fund such a good cross-section of our most promising young researchers this year," he said.
Applications to the Marsen Fund are extremely competitive. Of the 910 preliminary proposals received, 232 were asked to submit a full proposal with 93 ultimately being funded.
A full list of this year's Marsden Fund recipients is available here.
- NZ HERALD STAFF
