Chris Battershill, Sam McCormack, Libby Evans-Illidge and Dr Nigel Calder. Photo/UOW
Chris Battershill, Sam McCormack, Libby Evans-Illidge and Dr Nigel Calder. Photo/UOW
University of Waikato student Sam McCormack, who is researching potentially commercial pharmaceutical properties of the Bay of Plenty's sea sponges, won the Research-in-3 session held as part of the university's Treasuring the Bay Coastal Economic Symposium in Tauranga.
"Students are taking part in a diverse range of valuable research inand around the Bay of Plenty marine environment and this forum gives them an excellent opportunity to present their projects to an engaged audience," said symposium organiser Dr Nigel Calder.
Mr McCormack was a masters student whose research involves classifying and categorising different species based on their chemical makeup, which would help form part of a marine organism inventory for the Bay of Plenty.
Dr Calder said the Research-in-3 session was always a highlight of the day-long research event. Science students have three minutes to outline their summer research projects as part of their Masters and PhD programmes. As well as University of Waikato students, the Research-in-3 session included students from Bay of Plenty Polytechnic and Te Whare Wananga o Awanuiarangi.
More than 100 people attended the event, held last Friday, and Dr Calder said the symposium was a great opportunity for people to engage with and learn from top-class scientists and economists.
Libby Evans-Illidge, manager of the Bioresources Library at the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) in Queensland and director of the AIMS at James Cook University postgraduate research alliance, gave the keynote presentation.
Professor Chris Battershill, who heads Tauranga's Coastal Marine Field Station, discussed how the ideas put forward by Ms Evans-Illidge could be incorporated into future opportunities for marine biodiscovery in the Bay of Plenty region.
"The Bay of Plenty marine environment is diverse, with shallow estuaries, rocky reefs and even an offshore volcano - yet it has never been surveyed for bioresources.
"It is highly likely we will find organisms with potentially useful chemical properties, which could especially be valuable for agricultural use," he said.
Ms Evans-Illidge's work has included developing a library of bioresources from 2000 sites around Australia, to look for bioactive compounds which could potentially lead to commercial drug development.
She said that while many years of bioresource research would not always lead to commercial success, there were numerous non-commercial benefits that made the research worthwhile and important.
"Through our research we now have in-depth knowledge of more than 20,000 marine organisms, including the discovery of many new species. This work has also helped to facilitate training and employment opportunities and commercial aquaculture development in remote indigenous communities," she said.
There were several other presentations. These included updates on agribusiness in the Bay of Plenty and the Rena environmental monitoring programme, research into youth volunteering during crisis events and an introduction to the recently established House of Science, which was aimed at building stronger links between science education and business in Tauranga.
