Case study: Developing the next generation of Antarctic and Southern Ocean researchers

A key capability for sustaining New Zealand’s reputation in, and impact from, Antarctic and Southern Ocean research is specialist expertise. Expert capabilities take many years to develop and cannot be replaced or retrained quickly. Likewise, under-investment in capability undermines a sector’s capacity to deal with new challenges.

As a long-term strategic investment, the Antarctic Science Platform has a focus on capability development, at both individual and community level, through nourishing innovative, impactful and cooperative research. The Platform’s goal is to recruit the best talent into a space critical for the future of humanity in a changing climate, and expose them to world class research opportunities within a supportive, interdisciplinary environment.

Career Development of Early Career Researchers (ECRs)

To date, the Platform has supported over 30 ECRs (defined as eight years post PhD). Currently 20 ECRs are involved with the Platform, including eight new in 2023/24. The Platform also supports postgraduate students (PhD and Masters), a mix of Platform- and externally- funded, recruited to explore emerging research opportunities. Over 50 postgraduate students have contributed to Platform research since 2019, with more than 30 PhD students involved in 2023/24.

The Platform offers a range of career development support, including mentoring, funding, fellowships, building of cohorts, and leadership roles. ECR support spans the spectrum from science to policy, including secondment to end users and policy-specific PhD research. One ECR and a PhD student have been supported to join the New Zealand delegation for international policy meetings within the Antarctic Treaty System.

Emerging researchers serve in leadership roles as Co-Principal Investigators, Objective Leaders and field event leaders. They work closely with other postdocs, post-graduate students, international collaborators and senior staff, and have led journal publications and presented at national and international conferences. Many of the emerging researchers in Phase 1 (2019-2025) are taking on more leadership and responsibility in the Platform’s second Phase of funding (2025-2032; currently in development). This includes a Co-Principal Investigator moving into the director role, and objective leaders moving into Co-Principal Investigator roles.

The Platform’s Opportunity Fund was a peer-reviewed mechanism to invest in a range of emerging topics, and seven out of eight awards were to ECRs. In addition to advancing their Antarctic science, this funding ($100k each) allowed ECRs to develop skills in proposal preparation and a track record in project leadership. The Platform also jointly funded an ECR internship with the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI), which contributed to the Platform's pathway to impact in marine ecosystem management.

The ECRs have proactively developed a Platform ECR group, which engages regularly with the Platform leadership team to provide input to future ECR development initiatives.

The Platform’s ECR-network approach has enhanced cross-project collaboration and expanded the horizons of this next generation of researchers. The Modelling Hub provides once such example. In the Hub, four full-time post-doctoral modelling fellowships were funded by the Platform (2019-2023) to fill a critical gap in New Zealand modelling expertise. Focussing on interdisciplinary modelling capabilities for Antarctic and Southern Ocean research, the hub has expanded to a community that includes 52 associated diverse researchers from around Aotearoa, with an active core of around 16 (eight researchers and eight postgraduate students). The hub sustains future capability, with ECRs now supervising PhD students, and delivering an annual ‘Winter School’ on numerical modelling, data analysis, and computational techniques for Earth and climate sciences.

The 2024 research voyage to the Ross Sea, onboard the RV Laura Bassi, in collaboration with Italian researchers, was designed to support a high participation of ECRs and students, to build a cohort. To that end, the Platform secured philanthropic funding (€250,000) to support five ECRs and six PhD students (who are working with those ECRs) from New Zealand and Italy. The connections forged through that voyage resulted in a communal ECR paper presented at the 2024 Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research Open conference, with more collaboration planned.