Our Team
Te Pūnaha Matatini is committed to diversity.
Women make up 32% of the founding Principal Investigators, and we are committed to ensuring that this grows to being fully representative by 2020.
Te Pūnaha Matatini is a family-friendly Centre of Research Excellence, with a commitment to rewarding merit relative to opportunity, and to applying best practise in enabling opportunity.
We are dedicated to developing the skills and talents of young Māori and Pasifika researchers in the variety of disciplines represented within our team, partnering with the Māori Centre of Research Excellence to develop our strategy to build capability in complexity sciences.
We have established the Te Pūnaha Matatini Whānau to support our early-career researchers, post-doctoral fellows, and PhD students; holistic and culturally appropriate support for our Māori and Pasifika student cohorts will be offered through this group.
Shaun Hendy is Director of Te Pūnaha Matatini and Professor of Physics at the University of Auckland. His interest in the science of complexity was piqued at a lunchtime journal club at Industrial Research Ltd, where the group got talking about complexity scientist Geoffrey West’s work on the increase in the number of patents per capita with city size in the United States. Hendy then downloaded an international patent database to check if the same patterns occurred in New Zealand, and found that the difference in patents per capita between Australia and New Zealand could be explained by the difference in population distributions.
