University of Canterbury funded Research Programmes

We will deliver a novel diagnostic platform for user-friendly, cost-effective biosensing devices adaptable to multiple sectors. This platform will enable rapid in-field testing and point-of-care diagnostics by simplifying and bypassing current requirements for fluid handling, specialised equipment, and skilled labour.

To demonstrate the platform's versatility, we will develop four prototype devices across three applications: one for early detection of Alzheimer’s disease, one for multi-drug detection in workplace and roadside testing, and two that streamline quality control in winemaking.

Our applications are driven by industry demand following engagement with winemakers, forensic toxicologists, police and clinicians, all of whom highlighted the need for user-friendly devices delivering rapid and accurate results to enable timely, informed decisions.

Our innovative approach is founded on deep expertise in microfluidic device engineering, synthetic chemistry, biomolecular design, and biosensing platforms. Building on our existing intellectual property in microfluidics and biosensors, we will unlock commercial opportunities in Agritech, Drug testing, and Medtech. This will reduce costs for winemakers, improve workplace and road safety, and enhance healthcare outcomes. We will collaborate with diverse stakeholders to ensure the platform meets real-world needs and accelerate its adoption.

The program will strengthen New Zealand’s Biotech sector by training scientists at the interface of biology, engineering and commercialisation, equipping them to become the next generation of biotech entrepreneurs.

Our multidisciplinary, multi-institutional and international team includes world leaders in microfluidics, biosensor design, diagnostics, and commercialisation. Together, the technical platform that we develop will provide a foundation for future growth in sectors requiring affordable, straightforward monitoring, including environmental, food, and medical industries.

Negative emissions from land-based Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) can help NZ meet its climate targets. Today, this mainly occurs by planting new exotic (pine) forests for carbon credits. However, land availability and declining social licence may limit future forestry removals.

Three other land-based removal technologies could replace carbon forestry, and NZ has some natural advantages:

Bioenergy carbon capture – combusting biomass instead of fossil fuels (e.g., at dairy factories), capturing the CO2, and dissolving it into underground water.

Enhanced rock weathering – crushing up volcanic rocks with special properties, spreading them on pasture as fertiliser, with CO2 absorption happening due to the natural metereological weathering cycle.

Direct air capture – exposing air directly to certain types of rocks or materials that absorb CO2.

To make a difference, we will need at least 1 million tonnes per year (a megatonne) of removals. This could generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues and co-benefits (e.g., green CO2, increased renewable power). However, the chemistry, costs, and compatibility of these new technologies are yet to be explored in a NZ context.

Our team of researchers comes from geological and environmental science, energy engineering, Mātauranga, legal policy, and economics. Our research takes a holistic view to derisking removals, including experiments in CO2-rock chemistry, engineering of safe underground storage, identifying synergies in the green economy that reduce life-cycle cost and waste, and designing monitoring and verification policy that gives stakeholders confidence in removals.

To implement the research, we will work with Māori enterprises and primary sector stakeholders to develop place-based case studies that map the benefits and challenges of future removals projects.

Our primary industries face numerous pathogens, with a dwindling supply of sustainable solutions for protecting food production. Our programme will create safe and environmentally friendly biocontrols to combat bacterial pathogens in Aotearoa New Zealand and abroad. We are building on our expertise to generate a robust pipeline for the discovery and development of non-GM phage-based biocontrols against any bacterial pathogen. Our program will exploit data-intensive analysis of phage-bacterial interactions, employ smart cocktail design and evolutionary methods to create phage biocontrols that target the appropriate pathogens and mitigate phage resistance.

Our interdisciplinary team includes a broad range of research experience and Māori leaders who will work together to establish a phage biocontrol pipeline for commercialisation and manufacture in Aotearoa New Zealand. We will target 4 important pathogens with different challenges and at different research and development stages to ensure the creation of robust and generalisable phage-based solutions. Our initial products will economically benefit the kiwifruit and apiculture sectors, which were significantly impacted by bacterial pathogens. Further pipeline optimisation involves research on phage biocontrols for cherry and salmon industries.

Our programme will create a new phage manufacturing bioindustry in Aotearoa New Zealand with highly-skilled jobs and will improve our food sectors’ productivity. Longer term, our platform will be ideally positioned to pivot towards emerging threats to food production, and even medically-relevant human pathogens.

We will work closely with stakeholder and advisory committees, while conducting outreach and market acceptance work to ensure impactful outcomes. This programme will generate a knowledge-intensive sector, provide environmental and sustainability benefits, reduce toxic agrichemicals, improve user safety and brand identity, and enhance market access in environmentally-conscious global markets.

As 1 of only 12 space-faring nations, NZ is uniquely placed to leverage its domestic launch services to develop a world-leading space ecosystem. Hundreds of biological experiments are conducted on the International Space Station (ISS) each year, with studies ranging from human physiology and molecular biology, to microbiology and plant biology. These discoveries have translated directly into clinical biomedical applications, new drug development, and sustainable solutions for primary industries. Microgravity protein crystallisation is an increasingly valuable tool for the pharmaceutical and biotechnology sectors, with the majority of crystals grown in microgravity exhibiting superior quality over control experiments conducted on Earth. Despite the significant value microgravity experimentation can provide to the global USD 1.1B protein crystallisation industry, executing microgravity crystallisation is currently orders of magnitude more challenging than analogous experiments on Earth, with costs and extended experimentation timelines cited as leading reasons for preventing most potential clients from utilising microgravity.

To address these challenges, we will build upon our successful protein crystallisation prototype development develop fully-automated, high-throughput crystallisation facilities. Our partnership with leading commercial microgravity platform developer Axiom Space will ensure regular, frequent, and cost-effective missions to both the ISS in the near term and the first commercial space station from 2025 to enable efficient, streamlined services to pharmaceutical and academic/government research customers. Our programme will validate the designs of our hardware and software systems, provide critical flight heritage for our commercial modules, and lay the groundwork for implementation of long-term commercial platforms on Axiom Station. We will use the technology, partnerships, and processes developed in this programme to establish a competitive commercial microgravity research industry in New Zealand at the interface between the trillion-dollar global pharmaceutical and aerospace sectors.

New Zealand’s wine industry/viticulture sector is 1 of our most important and valuable horticulture industries, adding nearly NZ$2.4B, NZ$2B being exports, per year to our GDP.

Correct forecasting grape yield is a key issue for the sector and inaccurate techniques used today can be costly and destroy grower/winery profits.

To solve this problem, we will develop a novel approach combining a cutting-edge imaging-based detection system with a physiological growth prediction model. This is a highly complex interlinked and challenging measurement and data problem and has not been approached in the way we propose.

Encouraged by our recent results and progress we will combine:

a system for 3D image capture

a novel 3-dimensional imaging reconstruction technique

a world first integrated “digital grapevine twin” mode based on a functional-structural whole-plant models.

We assembled a strong multidisciplinary, multi-institutional research team, including Vision Mātauranga experts, covering all technical aspects our research. Our research team will be supported by an industry advisory board composed of key NZ stakeholders in robotics/data analytics and viticulture.

Our systems will provide multiple immediate and ultimate benefits across different sectors, including:

• increased average yield and improved operational and financial planning for wineries/vineyards
• revenue and export opportunities for NZ Agritech high-value-manufacturing and ICT companies,
• accelerated vineyard automation which will help to mitigate labour shortages and cost
• better preparation of vineyards for climate change.

Our programme will solve an expensive and important problem for the viticulture sector and create new revenue and export opportunities for New Zealand high-value manufacturing companies. We envisage that solving occlusion issues will serve as a template for future research and become a cornerstone for more extensively automating our future agriculture high-tech sector.

Aotearoa New Zealand’s economy and energy system is undergoing a fundamental transformation to achieve climate change and decarbonisation goals. Pūhiko Nukutū (Earth Battery) is investigating how to create large stores of green hydrogen underground earth batteries that can unlock a potentially massive hydrogen industry in Aotearoa. The ability to store hydrogen, in large quantities and for a long time, means that it can be produced when electricity costs are low, and later sold when prices are high, or when it is strategically valuable, for instance, when hydro-dams are low. The cultural, environmental and social acceptability of Pūhiko Nukutū is also being investigated to ensure that decision making is fully informed by both science and mātauranga Māori as integral parts of the holistic impact analysis. This will be essential to progress from innovation to implementation.

Pūhiko Nukutū examines the complex interactions of rocks and microbes when exposed to hydrogen, to predict how, where and for how long hydrogen can be stored. The international exemplar Mauri Model Decision Making Framework is the basis for representing and analysing the holistic impacts upon mauri. We will use geophysical investigations, computer models, and systems thinking to evaluate how different storage approaches impact the mauri (life-supporting capacity) of communities, Iwi and the environment. Finally, we will study how this new technology can integrate symbiotically with New Zealand’s complex energy system.

Our programme will include contributions from scientists, Iwi experts, and industry leaders across Aotearoa. Through our international partners, we have access to cutting edge laboratory and computing facilities. Supported by a well-positioned, transitioning energy sector, hydrogen geostorage has the potential to unlock a multi-billion dollar hydrogen economy that benefits all of New Zealand.

Food processing is one of New Zealand’s most important economic sectors. Food safety and quality control are at the core of all government and industry food strategies.

We will develop a new imaging technique, referred to as “electrical admittance tomography”. By detecting and digitally processing the variations in electric and magnetic fields within food mixtures flowing through our sensors, we will be able to “see” into the food as it is being processed and in motion. These variations arise due to the differences in electrical conductivity of different materials passing through – for instance metals are very conductive, plastic and rubber are non-conductive, while foods occupy a range in between.

The new technology will provide a multifunctional, economical, viable detection system to enhance product quality, safety and efficiency in the food processing industry. The core research team is based at the Universities of Canterbury and Auckland, and Lincoln Agritech. This team has expertise ranging from computer modelling, electronic sensing and digital signal processing, through to food process engineering. In addition we are working with overseas experts in electrical imaging and food processing.

Our programme will produce many benefits for a wide range of end users, including milk, cheese, ice-cream and sausage producers. In addition to improved food safety, reduced waste and increased efficiency, will be the creation of jobs in manufacturing to produce and sell the sensing and imaging systems based on our technology.

We are working with NZ-based manufacturing and process design partners, to produce and market the products, and with seven well-known major NZ food producers, in the dairy and meat processing sectors.

Robotics has revolutionised a wide range of industries over the past decades. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs/drones) are revolutionising surveying and inspection tasks that once required manned aircraft, and becoming a standard tool for a wide range of applications. However, one glaring omission our project will solve is UAVs as flying robots, which are able to accurately use tools to perform precision tasks at high and hard-to-reach locations.

Our novel solution is to design, build and demonstrate a compact UAV with precise 6 degrees-of-freedom positioning capability enabled by new control methods, airframe designs, aerodynamic models, and position estimation (visual odometry) in dynamically changing (windy) environments.

We have assembled a leading drone research team, including a wide network of international collaborators to tackle these challenging tasks. We designed our implementation for fast uptake and maximum impact in a wide range of industry sectors. For NZ UAV manufacturers, a new product class of UAVs able to use precision tools will open new national and huge international markets increasing export earnings. For users in arboriculture, silviculture, electricity industry, agriculture and construction sector our technology will help to increase productivity, decrease costs and substantially improve worker’s health & safety.

In summary, our programme will help to redefine how and where we are able to use UAVs as aerial robots to perform tasks. This will move humans out of harm’s way and increase productivity for a wide range of different industry sectors and end users, ultimately benefiting every New Zealander.