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News
| | International recognition for Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga and Māori scientists | | 13 November 2007: AUCKLAND, New Zealand: The
current issue of one of the world’s top two science magazines has
hailed New Zealand scientist Professor Michael Walker’s groundbreaking
discoveries in animal navigation and profiled the unique role of the
Māori Centre of Research Excellence, Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga, in
creating a “home for Māori science”.
Science says Professor
Walker’s work on how birds and other animals detect and use magnetic
fields to navigate over vast distances has shaped research in the field.
US
researcher Joseph Kirschvink of the California Institute of Technology
told Science: “If there is ever a Nobel Prize for magnetic field
perception, Walker’s name will be on it.”
The magazine also
reports the success of Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga, of which Professor
Walker is a founding joint director, in supporting Māori scientists and
helping boost the numbers of Māori PhD students from a handful in 2002
to over 500.
Professor Walker, who is also a member of the
School of Biological Sciences at The University of Auckland, said the
recognition of the science and of a distinctively Māori contribution
from such a prestigious journal was highly welcome.
“Every
culture brings its own value and perspective to research. At Ngā Pae o
te Māramatanga we are tapping into the currently very under-used
potential of the Māori contribution, and we are delighted to see how
strongly this is growing.”
Discoveries on differing rates of
evolution in the tropics by another scientist, Dr Shane Wright, whose
work was fully funded by the CoRE, were reported this year in the
Economist and the Guardian and published in the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences in the United States.
Ends
download sciencemag.org here
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