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How do birds navigate vast oceans, correcting themselves when blown off-course? The inner compass possessed by some animals is an enigma that has absorbed Professor Michael Walker, Joint Director Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga, for many years. His breakthrough in extracting magnetite – the iron mineral also known as lodestone – from yellowfin tuna established a physical basis for this creature’s ability to detect the Earth’s magnetic field and was published in Science magazine in 1984.

A few sleepless nights may well have been all to the good for Sarah-Jane Paine. She successfully completed her doctorate in 2006 on key factors affecting sleep and how they might be affected by ethnicity and socio-economic factors – and in the process became one of 500 new Mäori PhDs last year.

In a paper published in the international Journal of Biological Rhythms, Sarah-Jane, who isfrom Tühoe iwi, saw a prevalence of both “morning people” and ”night owls” in New Zealand.

Now largely surrounded by downtown Napier, Te Whanganui-a-Orotü (the Ahuriri Estuary), has seen decades of agricultural, industrial, and urban activity that have transformed this once pristine cultural and food resource into a sink for environmental contaminants. Pushing the lagoon floor up two metres, the region’s 1931 earthquake only added to reclamation and pollution of food stocks.

PhDs are the backbone of any research community. Yet for the first hundred years or so of universities in New Zealand the number of Mäori doctorates could have been counted on not too many hands. This might make the target Ngä Pae o te Märamatanga set in 2002 of contributing to 500 new Mäori PhDs in five years only look the more unrealistic. But it is a welcome measure of change, and of a lot of hard work, that Emeritus Professor Leslie R Tumoana Williams, the Centre’s Capability Building Manager, says that target is well on the way to being achieved.