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When Dr Christopher Cornwall began his biological research career, three unanswered questions bothered him about how climate change might affect marine organisms.
The Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington Rutherford Discovery Fellow has now won this year’s Prime Minister’s MacDiarmid Emerging Scientist Prize for helping answer them.
Dr Cornwall, in the School of Biological Sciences, becomes the third Te Herenga Waka researcher to win the $200,000 award.
His success follows the awarding last year of the top Prime Minister’s Science Prize to a team from the University’s Antarctic Research Centre, along with many other prizes to University researchers during the past 12 years.
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The five Prime Minister’s Science Prizes are New Zealand’s most valuable research awards. Awarded annually, they are worth nearly $1 million.
A real team effort
The team prize, worth half a million, has been awarded to a consortium of 24 researchers working together in the field of complexity science as part of Te Pūnaha Matatini, a Centre of Research Excellence.
In early 2020, director Shaun Hendy saw that there was a gap in providing the New Zealand Government with the data science it needed to make informed decisions about responding to the Covid-19 pandemic.