University of Auckland

Media

A feature article in the Spring 2024 issue of Ingenio focused on cleantech and green technologies has been published containing contributions from Dr Ziyun Wang, Dr Erin Leitao and Dr Cameron Weber. The article can be found here: Cleantech: a green industrial revolution - The University of Auckland. 

Staff successes

Awards

Congratulations to Dr Alan Cameron for being the 2024 recipient of the Thermo Fisher Scientific Award for Excellence in Molecular Biology. As part of this recognition, Alan was invited to speak at Queenstown Research Week (QMB024), where he was presented with the award.

‍Funding

Congratulations to Professor Jon Sperry and Dr Ziyun Wang who were successful in the recent Catalyst: Seeding round.

Congratulations to Dr Rosalyn Falconer who has been awarded Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Fast Start Award for a project entitled, “Potential of earth abundant catalysts by affixing to solid supports.”

We are pleased to announce that Professor Geoff Waterhouse has been awarded an Outgoing Hood Fellowship for travel in 2025. This prestigious fellowship comes with an approved expenditure of $25,000, enabling Geoff to deliver high-impact outcomes relating to new catalyst design for the energy sector, strengthen relationships between UoA and four leading universities/research institutes in China and bring long-term benefits to the broader UoA research community. 

Congratulations to the successful applicants in this year’s MBIE rounds. Staff from the School were successful in four applications this year. The value of these projects to the University of Auckland is over $2.7 million:

• Jon Sperry (PI) and Cameron Weber (key researcher) for Smart Ideas project, “Heavy drugs for improved glioblastoma prognosis”. 
• Danae Larsen (PI) and Davide Mercadante (key researcher) for Smart Ideas project, “Re-imagining sweetness through protein design”. 
• Geoff Waterhouse is a researcher on the GNS-led Smart Ideas project, “Semiconductor electrocatalysts for renewable-powered ammonia farms: towards green fertilisers and energy storage”.
• Margaret Brimble and David Rennison are key researchers on the Cawthron Institute-led MBIE Research Programme project, “Effective eradication: strategies, tactics, and technologies for successful marine invasion management”.   

Student successes

Awards

Congratulations to Clouie Justin Aguilar (CJ) for winning a prize at the EPS 2024. CJ was awarded the 3rd prize in the Best Young Investigator Poster Presentation at the 37th European Peptide Symposium held in Florence, Italy, 25-31 August 2024. CJ works under the supervision of Dr Iman Kavianinia and the co-supervision of Distinguished Professor Dame Margaret Brimble and Dr Mak Sarwar (University of Otago). CJ’s poster focused on developing a novel green method to protect primary amines and its application in peptide synthesis.

‍Publications

Congratulations to Juliana Tong on her first-author publication in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. Juliana’s PhD work on developing a novel cleavable linker strategy for antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) has been published in JACS, (https://doi.org/10.1021/jacs.4c04567). Under the supervision of Iman Kavianinia and Margaret Brimble, Juliana successfully defended her thesis in February 2024 and is now a Postdoctoral Associate at the Calibr-Skaggs Institute for Innovative Medicines.

Congratulations to Vanessa Ung (PhD student in the Mercadante group) for her recent publication as an equally contributing first author in Nature Communications. In this collaborative effort between New Zealand and France, Vanessa’s work combined coarse-grained Langevin simulations, smFRET and NMR spectroscopy to study the self-association of the intrinsically disordered protein eIF4B, a translation factor. The simulations successfully reconstituted the ensemble of eIF4B fully matching experimentally derived quantities (FRET efficiencies) and ultimately revealing how unique sequence features of the eIF4B sequence regulate its self-association into various oligomeric states. This research importantly enhances our understanding of key cellular processes such as translation but also opens new avenues for designing bio-polymers with tunable properties, by understanding the rules that link polymer sequence and conformation. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-53136-1. 

AUT News 

New faces

Welcome to Megha Baburaj Sijarani, a Marsden-funded PhD student who will work with Professor Nicola Brasch, Associate Professor Brent Seale and Associate Professor Yan Li to investigate the potential of vitamin B₁₂ to carry antibiotics into Gram-negative bacteria.  

Congratulations

Together with collaborators at Kent State University, USA, Anau Lautaha, Vinay Bharadwaj and Professor Nicola Brasch published the article, “Developing photoactive coumarin-caged N-hydroxysulfonamides for generation of nitroxyl (HNO)” in Molecules, demonstrating that up to 97% of the desired (H)NO-releasing pathway occurs upon photoirradiation (DOI: 10.3390/molecules29163918).

Dr Jack Chen was a finalist for the Sprout Breakthrough Innovator Award at the KiwiNet Awards for the development of Spherelose - a sustainable surfactant platform derived from wood pulp cellulose (https://kiwinet.org.nz/Awards/Awards2024Finalists). Spherelose Ltd has also been included in the Next 95 list by the Sustainable Business Network (https://sustainable.org.nz/next-95/technology/), a list of innovators and projects to watch out for in the future!

Congratulations to Anau Lautaha and Nimra Abdul Haleem who were awarded a Dodd-Walls Centre travel scholarship to attend the NZIC conference in Dunedin held in November 2024.