User:MikiWikiMouse/Pauline Harris

Pauline Harris is an academic from New Zealand. She is currently a Post-Doctoral fellow in Physics and Mātauranga Māori (Maori knowledge) at the School of Chemical and Physical Sciences at Victoria University of Wellington researching Māori and Western astronomical knowledge and Maratamaka (Māori traditional calendars). She has a PhD and Master's in Physics from Canterbury University, focused on astronomy and gamma ray bursts, high-energy neutrino production and inflationary cosmology. She is also chair of the Society for Maori Astronomy Research and Traditions (SMART), a Principal Investigator in Material Science at the MacDiarmid Institute for Advanced Materials and Nanotechnology, and an active member of Māori community organizations, and the wider Pacific community. Pauline is investigating how traditional Maori approaches to monitoring our environment, weather, agriculture, biology and astronomical knowledge can help our understanding of ecological changes. Pauline is part of a team building a floating volcano observatory which will be mounted on traditional canoes called waka. This "waka lab" will sail close to underwater volcanoes in Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. With aerial drones and ocean submersibles launched from the waka, the team will collect samples to research the environmental impacts of volcanic gases and help identify potentially hazardous volcanoes. Pauline is from the Rongomaiwahine, Ngāti Rakaipaka and Ngāti Kahungunu tribes.

https://www.noted.co.nz/currently/currently-science/rebecca-priestley-the-intersection-of-astrophysics-and-matauranga-maori https://www.macdiarmid.ac.nz/our-people/principal-investigators/show/dr-pauline-harris/