Royal Society Te Apārangi Wellington Branch Postgraduate Scholarships for 2025
Need funds to support your Ph.D research? The Wellington Branch of the Royal Society Te Apārangi offers one or more $500 scholarships to support postgraduate student research and researchers in Wellington. There is no restriction on how the funds may be spent, other than they support the student’s postgraduate work. The Scholarship will be awarded on the basis of meritand financial need. Additional funds may be approved in particularly deserving cases.
Please send your application to the Secretary at this link:
. . . by Friday 5 September 2025. Recipients will be notified in late September 2025.
Application Details
To apply, applicants must be members of the Wellington Branch of the Royal Society Te Apārangi. Signing up is easy - just go to the page titled ‘Join Us.’
Your application should contain the following:
Brief outline of research topic and degree
University and department in which you are enrolled
Details of academic and research performance, particularly an academic CV which contains:
Academic transcript
Publications
Other relevant information
Justification for financial assistance
docTORal scholarships for 2025
This year we awarded two doctoral scholarships. Our winners were Antje Schiller and Richard Littauer, both Ph.D students at Victoria University of Wellington.
Antje Schiller
Prior to commencing her doctoral studies, Antje worked with the international NGO, Mercy Corps, where she specialised in grant management for humanitarian and development initiatives across the Middle East. Drawing on this professional experience - particularly her work in Iraq, the country with which she became most familiar during her tenure - her doctoral research explores how cultural and ethical perspectives shape peacebuilding policies and interventions in Iraq.
Peacebuilding efforts, both in Iraq and globally, are often marked by a misalignment between the priorities of international actors and the needs and aspirations of local communities. This disconnect can lead to interventions that are unsustainable or even counterproductive. Antje’s research seeks to address these tensions through a series of in-depth interviews with Iraqi NGO professionals, guided by the following question: What cultural and ethical perspectives shape peacebuilding work in Iraq, and how do NGO actors navigate these pluralities in practice?
Through this study, she aims to examine peacebuilding, not only as a technical framework, but also as a moral one. Antje’s supervisors are Dr Lorena Gibson and Dr Sara Salman.
Richard Littauer
Richard’s thesis title is: Building Tools for Community Science Datasets to Model Bird Populations and Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza in Aotearoa New Zealand. Community science platforms, such as eBird and iNaturalist, have enabled the creation of global observational datasets which afford unprecedented insights into natural biodiversity. The heterogeneous nature of the data presents significant challenges for standardisation, quality assurance, quality control and workflow management.
The goal of Richard’s research is to build tools that enable researchers to use these datasets with higher degrees of certainty, to develop workflows to allow for standardised, reproducible processing of the data, and to use case studies that offer meaningful insights into how community science can be used to understand epidemiology and population demographics - all in order to inform public policy.
In particular, Richard focuses on bird populations in Aoteaora New Zealand and Oceania, and on predicting the oncoming significant threat posed by Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza. Richard’s supervisors are Kris Bubendorfer and Markus Luczac-Roesch.
Meet amey hughes - our 2023 Ph.D Scholarship WInner
I am a Ph.D Candidate at Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington in cell and molecular biology under the joint supervision of Associate Professor Janet Pitman and Dr. Simon Hinkley at the Ferrier Institute. I have spent the last six years living and studying in wellington, completing my Bachelor of Biomedical Science with First Class honours, before beginning my PhD study in February of 2022.
My research is focused on Kākāpō, which are a species of parrot that is endemic to Aotearoa and have become critically endangered. Kākāpō breed only every 2-5 years, coinciding with the fruiting of the New Zealand rimu. Despite the breeding strategies developed by the Kākāpō Recovery Team, the kākāpō population has only risen to about 200 individuals.
The mechanistic link between successful breeding and rimu fruit is unknown. One hypothesis is that phytoestrogens in rimu fruit act on oestrogen receptors (ESR1) in the liver, stimulate egg yolk protein production leading to ovarian follicle maturation. We reported oestrogenic activity in crude rimu fruit extracts and identified an amino acid indel in the ligand-binding domain of Kākāpō ESR1 that may increase sensitivity to phytoestrogens.
Therefore, we hypothesize that compound(s) present in the diet of kākāpō influences their reproductive success. It is possible that these compounds act on a range of receptors that have downstream effects on the birds’ fertility or fecundity. In this PhD study, a suite of sensitive kākāpō-specific yeast bioassays will be developed, to examine the interaction of rimu fruit extracts, and other native flora with several nuclear receptors, namely, oestrogen receptors a and b (ESR1 and ESR2 respectively) and androgen receptor (AR), as well as the cytosolic transcription factor aryl-hydrocarbon receptor (AHR).
2022 Ph.D Scholarship WInners
This year we awarded three Ph.D Scholarships. Our winners are Solomon Gurmu Beka, Maria Rabino Neira and Natalie Germann.
You can read about them here.
Solomon Gurmu Beka
Solomon Gurmu Beka is a Ph.D. Candidate in Aviation Medicine at the University of Otago, under the supervision of Dr. Robin Griffiths. Solomon is from East Africa, Ethiopia. Solomon served at Ethiopian Air Force Hospital, mainly as a Consultant Emergency Surgery Professional Specialist and Aviation Medical Examiner for the last seven years and he is a Public Health Expert. Solomon studied at the University of Gondar and Wollo University, Ethiopia. He did research and thesis at both Universities for the fulfillment of his undergraduate and post-graduate studies consecutively. Additionally, he is the President of the Ethiopian Emergency Surgery Association (EESA) and a Member of the Board of Directors at the World Society of Emergency Surgery (WSES). He has participated in different clinical and public health services, health-related volunteer services, and research activities, and published in different international journals.
His dissertation focuses on developing tools for flight safety risk mitigation strategies in airline aviation personnel. Solomon will conduct a systematic literature review, and then results with high statistical predictive values from reviewed literature will be considered. A modified Delphi survey design will be used to develop a screening tool that is acceptable and practicable for aviation medical assessment by a group or panel of informed individuals or specialists in the field of aerospace medicine. These experts will contribute their opinion to develop a screening tool. Finally, the proposed tool developed from the feedback of experts will be tested with participants for validation through a cross-sectional study. The acceptability and feasibility of the proposed screening tool will be tested with a mixed methods study approach within other aviation personnel settings.
Maria Rabino-Neira
Maria Rabino-Neira is an International Humanitarian lawyer (University of Buenos Aires, Argentina) and Magister in Conflicts & Terrorism (University of Auckland, New Zealand). She has previously engaged in peace-building processes, humanitarian interventions and transitional justice tribunals. Maria has also worked in several international organisations, including the United Nations Mission in Colombia, World Vision New Zealand and the New Zealand Red Cross. Currently, she is doing her Ph.D in the School of Law at the Victoria University of Wellington, under the supervision of Professor Alberto Costi and Dr Marnie Lloydd.
Maria’s Research
The Rules of Armed Conflicts or International Humanitarian Law (IHL) are a set of principles and rules that aim to limit the effects of armed conflict and provide a balance between the military necessity and the humanitarian necessity to protect the victims of war. Despite these efforts, over the last two decades, an increased tendency to normalize violence against neutral actors and direct attacks against civilians, medical units and humanitarian workers has been recognized in those armed conflicts with designated terrorist organizations. These situations not only reflect the insufficient compliance with the humanitarian principles by non-state armed groups but also embody the limitations of counter-terrorism frameworks to mitigate terrorism in armed conflicts. Scholars at Harvard Law School have recognized that “If the current trajectory continues, two possibilities seem likely to come to pass. One is that counterterrorism measures may further constrain the practical scope of impartial humanitarian activities. A second is that an ever-expanding counterterrorism system will ultimately redefine what constitutes legitimate humanitarian activities.” (Lewis, D. and Modirzadeh, N., 2021: 10-11).
Maria’s research investigates the interplay between International Humanitarian Law and the Counter-terrorism normative framework to understand better how the protection of humanitarian workers can be improved in armed conflicts with terrorist organizations. This research aims to influence the policy frameworks and behavioral conduct of relevant actors, such as military forces and non-state armed groups, and enhance compliance to the humanitarian principles to prevent aid workers from being targeted and killed in war.
Natalie Germann
Natalie Germann is a Ph.D student studying in the Department of Psychological Medicine at the University of Otago. Her research is focused on mental health in Aotearoa. Specifically, it aims to examine the effectiveness of residential mental health care which provides dialectical behavioural therapy for clients. This project aims to have important clinical significance for mental health treatment at both a national and international level.
This year (2021) we awarded a scholarship to Ekaterina Isaac who is completing her PhD in embryology at Victoria University under the supervision of Associate Professor Peter Pfeffer.
