Meetings are held at the Te Awa Lifecare Woolshed, 1866 Cambridge Road, Cambridge, from 10am for 10.30 until 12.00 noon on the second Friday of each month.
Friday October 11th, 2024 - Professor Russell Snell - Centre for Brain Research - Alzheimers and Huntington's Diseases
Professor Russell Snell was Born in Fielding and raised in South Otago. He studied Physics at Otago and completed a PhD in Genetics in Cardiff Wales in 1993. His research interest is in identifying the genetic basis of disease and also the use of genetics for improving New Zealand’s economy through cow and goat milk production. Russell has a diverse range of research areas but they have a single underlying theme of utilising genetic tools including whole genome sequencing to identify disease mechanism and the development of therapies.
An area of focus has been the long term project with the Minds For Minds group including Dr Jessie Jacobsen and Prof Klaus Lehnert discovering genes and mutations in people with Autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders. This project has been very successful with many families benefiting from a definitive diagnoses and personal explanation for the cause of the condition.
Fragile X is a very common condition that often has autism as a co-occurring characteristic. The Cure Kids funding for Russell’s group is for the making of a sheep model of Fragile X to facilitate the testing of therapies. Russell has had extensive experience making and utilising sheep models with a unique very successful Huntington’s sheep line being used by many international groups and drug companies for therapeutic testing. The Fragile X sheep line will also be made available to the large number of investigators working on potential therapies. This work will bridge the gap between testing treatments in mouse studies which unfortunately have not translated into a successful therapies and trials in people with the condition. The Cure Kids funding will establish the line and subsequent funding will be sought with international collaborators to advance the use of the animals.
Friday October 25th, 2024 - SPECIAL PARTNERSHIP HISTORY LECTURE - Dr Warren Gumbley - Archeologist - The Waikato Horticultural Complex: Adaptation of Polynesian agronomy to a temperate environment
Warren Gumbley has worked as an archaeologist for over 40 years and has a Ph.D. from the Australian National University. His principal areas of research interest are: The adaptation of Polynesian horticulture to Aotearoa/New Zealand, the development of pā, the archaeology of mission stations, and the archaeology of the Waikato Land War of 1863-1864.
“Archaeology deals with the physical remains of what people have been doing, and often that’s associated with day-to-day activities: how people made a living, how they grew their crops, how they fished for eel, how they went about processing their food to eat and storing it, and what sort of houses they lived in,” said Warren.
Friday November 8th, 2024 - Dr Marnie Lloydd - Armed Conflict, the International Red Cross and Humanitarian Dilemmas: My Experiences
What role is there for law in the pain and madness of wars? What role is there for a neutral humanitarian organisation in the face of the dire protection needs of civilians? What is it like to be a New Zealander discussing such issues with the affected populations and the warring parties in countries like Afghanistan, Sri Lanka or the DRC?
Dr Marnie Lloydd specialises in international law related to armed conflict, forced migration, counterterrorism and foreign fighting, human rights and humanitarian law and policy.
Marnie’s current academic role at Te Herenga Waka | Victoria University of Wellington, builds on her extensive prior experience as a Delegate and Legal Adviser with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), representing the ICRC in Ethiopia, Sri Lanka, Chad, Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, as well as at the Geneva headquarters where she advised on international law and institutional humanitarian policy in support of the ICRC's activities in the Middle East.
Marnie has taught and spoken on issues of international humanitarian law and the humanitarian sector, foreign fighting, arms control and humanitarian affairs with diverse audiences around the world, including UN staff, diplomats, military legal advisers, and non-state armed groups. In 2022, she was awarded VUW's student association's supreme award of 'Lecturer of the Year' for her teaching. Marnie was also recognised as a Women Leader in Law by the Borrin Foundation in 2022, and has been selected as a Global Scholar with Harvard Law School's Institute of Global Law and Policy in 2018 & 2022. In addition to her teaching and research, she engages actively with Government, media and civil society. She is Associate-Director of the New Zealand Centre for Public Law and serves on NZ's IHL Committee, NZ’s Inter-governmental Working Group on Lethal Autonomous Weapons, and as Co-Chair of ANZSIL's International Peace & Security Interest Group.
Friday December 13th, 2024 - Madeleine Pierard - Dame Malvina Major Chair in Opera/Director of Te Pae Kokako - The Aotearoa New Zealand Opera Studio (TANZOS)
Te Pae Kōkako - The Aotearoa New Zealand Opera Studio (TANZOS) is a 12-18 month immersive programme which provides full-time training at an international level for exceptionally promising opera singers, regardless of circumstances. Each place is funded by a donor-gifted scholarship.
Our students receive coaching from national and international guest tutors and engage in professional residencies with companies in New Zealand and abroad, including an annual two-week residency with Opera Australia.
It is the only programme of its kind in Aotearoa New Zealand and open to a maximum of six singers per year. TANZOS encompasses all the necessary elements required to give singers the best possible start on the global opera stage.
Friday February 14th, 2025 - Dr Mary McIntyre - Possum & rat eradications (“Predator Free 2050”) …. good for us too!
Dr McIntyre is a (mostly) retired scientist with a background in ecology and entomology and some microbiology (environment, bugs & germs).
She has done research and run graduate programmes in conservation in the Department of Biological Sciences at Victoria University and Environmental Health in the Department of Public Health at the University of Otago campus in Newtown, with which she has a continued affiliation.
Her talk will combine perspectives from both fields which are partly unique to New Zealand, but also reflect some of what is becoming a global issue of emerging and re-emerging environmental and wildlife diseases in humans.
Predator Free 2050 Limited is a Crown-owned, charitable company established to help deliver the New Zealand Government’s goal of eradicating possums, stoats and rats by 2050.
This initiative has not been promoted as bringing benefits to human health but there will be considerable reduction of risk for local transmission of some diseases if this can be, at least in greater part, achieved. The Covid pandemic greatly increased public awareness of such issues, which will be exacerbated by the combination of ecological disruption and warming climate.
Friday April 11th, 2025 - Professor Michael Cameron - The Sobering Economics of Alcohol
Michael Cameron is Professor of Economics in the School of Accounting, Finance and Economics at the University of Waikato.
He is also a Research Associate in Te Ngira - Institute for Population Research. Michael's research interests are broad across population, health and development issues, including the social impacts of alcohol outlet density, the measurement of population ageing, migration, population modelling and stochastic modelling, financial literacy and economics education
Friday May 9th, 2025 - Dr Luke Harrington - How extreme weather will respond to a warming world in Aotearoa
“Dr Luke Harrington is a Senior Lecturer in Climate Change at the University of Waikato and leads the Climate Extremes and Societal Impacts (CLESI) research group. His team uses state-of-the-art climate models to understand how climate change influences observed extreme weather events around the world, with a focus on why some communities experience more significant changes than others. Work led by Harrington was the first to quantify the attributable role of climate change for the 2012/13 NZ drought, the extreme rainfall associated with Cyclone Gabrielle, as well as several studies focusing on extreme heat in NZ and globally.
In its 2022 edition, Harrington was the first New Zealander to feature in the ‘Healthcare and Science’ section of Forbes 30 under 30 Asia. He was a lead author on a 2021 OECD report examining losses and damages from climate change. He was also the 2023 recipient of the New Zealand Meteorological Society's Kidson Medal and Winner of the Emerging Scientist Award at the 2023 KuDos Awards.”
Friday July 11th, 2025 - Dr Vladimir Pacheco - Displacement, Trauma and Identity: a migrant's journey from fear to resilience.
Vladimir Pacheco is currently Associate Professor at the School of Culture and Society, Aarhus University, Denmark. His current research interests include socio-economic impacts and governance of non-renewable resource extraction in the Arctic, Latin America and the South Pacific. Previous to this position Vladimir held senior roles in Australia with the Foundation for Development Cooperation, the Centre for Social Responsibility in Mining and consulting firm WorleyParsons.
His latest publication is a chapter in a book titled “Ideology, Post-ideology and Anti-Ideology in Latin America” published by Bloomsbury Academic.
Talk background
In 2021, there were approximately 25 million refugees and 50 million internally displaced people (IDPs) in the world. Conflict, disasters and economic development are the main reasons for these forced movements with no signs of abatement.
At the same time, aspirations for the inclusion of displaced peoples are declining in many parts of the world, as exemplified by the rise of ultranationalist and/or populist politics. The accompanying xenophobic rhetoric portrays vulnerable migrants and internally displaced peoples as dangerous “others” undeserving of citizenship or any rights. From this perspective, very little is said about the traumas refugees have experienced.
Using a combination of publicly available information and biographical material, this talk aims to raise the issue of citizenship for vulnerable people in times of adversity and to raise the debate for building an inclusive, diverse and cosmopolitan society that allows for the understanding of differences, as well as the construction of personal identities that can resolve trauma by reconstructing the immigrant role in the host society. The talk will be given by Dr. Vladimir Pacheco Cueva, who became a refugee after fleeing El Salvador in 1981. He will talk about how his experiences mirror the larger humanitarian trends of the last 40 years.
Friday August 22nd, 2025 - SPECIAL PARTNERSHIP HISTORY LECTURE - Craig Hoyle - Excommunicated: Two centuries of complicated family history
Craig Hoyle was born in Kirikiriroa Hamilton into the Exclusive Brethren, an isolationist sect that shuns social contact with the outside world. After facing interrogations and conversion therapy for his sexuality, Craig was excommunicated from the Brethren and lost his family in 2009.
Today he is chief news director for the Sunday Star-Times. His book, Excommunicated, is a multigenerational memoir tracing 200 years of his family’s history, using letters, records and interviews to explore how his forebears became associated with the Brethren movement, and the subsequent impact over seven generations. Craig lives in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland.