Three University of Otago researchers, including a husband and wife, have received Fulbright senior scholar awards to study in the United States next year.
They are Prof Andrew Geddis and his wife, Jacinta Ruru, of the University of Otago Law Faculty, and Otago physiologist Associate Prof Fiona McDonald.
Prof Geddis, who gained a master of laws degree from Harvard University as a 1997 Fulbright New Zealand graduate student, will return to the United States to conduct a socio-legal study of freedom of expression in New Zealand.
He will also examine formal legal restrictions that have constrained people wishing to engage in dissenting speech as well as the cultural and historical background to such laws.
His research will be undertaken at both Arizona State University in the city of Tempe and at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Ms Ruru has been awarded the 2012 Fulbright-Nga Pae o te Maramatanga Senior Scholar Award to research indigenous challenges to Western property law, at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, and Arizona State University in Tempe.
She will focus on how property law could be "recalibrated to better accommodate indigenous claims to Crown or publicly owned lands and natural resources", award officials said.
This award offers up to $US25,000, plus travel expenses and insurance, to undertake research in the United States in a field of indigenous development.
Prof McDonald will travel to the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Centre in Dallas to undertake studies, from January, into the as yet unknown function of a protein named COMMD10. She aims to find out where COMMD10 is usually located in the body's cells and to clarify its normal role.
Prof McDonald said she was "tremendously excited" and "highly appreciative" of the support the Fulbright programme was providing for her research.
Born in Roxburgh, she attended St Hilda's Collegiate School, Dunedin, and gained a BSc (Hons) degree at Otago University and a PhD at Oxford University.
She intends to spend most of next year studying in Dallas, and will be accompanied by her husband, Graham Cowles, and their three children.
Fulbright senior awards provide financial support ranging from $US9750 ($NZ12,129) to $US32,500 ($40,430) for study periods of three to five months, as well as return air fares and insurance.
Other Fulbright senior scholarship recipients: Paul Cullen, AUT University; Jennifer Curtin, Auckland University; Frances Hughes, of Porirua; Shane Telfer, Massey University; 2012 Fulbright Visiting Scholar Awards in New Zealand Studies: John Hopkins, Canterbury University; Holly Thorpe, Waikato University; Fulbright-Cognition Scholar Award in Education Research: Kate Thornton, Victoria University of Wellington.
