Our Successes
Spin-Out Companies
As well as producing high calibre photonic and quantum scientists, Te Whai Ao — Dodd-Walls Centre has supported three high-profile university spin-out companies from the Photon Factory at the University of Auckland. These include sperm-sorting technology company, Engender Technologies; point-of-care diagnostics platform, Orbis Technologies and skin cancer screening company Luminoma.
Grant Successes
Every year our investigators apply for grants to continue their ground-breaking research. They have a tradition of success in garnering funding. Below is a list of some of our grant recipients in 2025.
Dr Luke Trainor of the University of Otago has been awarded a Mana Tūāpapa Future Leader Fellowship by the Royal Society, Te Apārangi. It’s valued at $820,000 over four years.
The award is an important step forward in Dr Trainor’s career and towards the real-world use and commercialisation of photonic and quantum technologies. He will study how “rare-earth-doped magnetically ordered crystals” may be used to create optical quantum memory. Like computer memory, quantum memory, can be used for storage of data.
Professor Harald Schwefel and his team have been granted Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment (MBIE) Endeavour funding of $12m. The team is building critical capability for space-based climate monitoring with next generation photonics.
Together with industry partners such as Paihau–Robinson Research Institute and Earth Science New Zealand as well as international counterparts from the United States, Finland, Australia and Spain, the group is using a technique called quantum-inspired non-linear frequency conversion. The research programme provides an amazing “tech-in-a box” alternative to a giant NASA satellite which is coming to the end of its life.
Congratulations are also due to Sofie Claridge, one of seven exceptional university students who earned a New Zealand Space Scholarships and interned at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California in 2025.
Sofie is pursuing a PhD in Machine Learning, focusing on enhancing the temperature sensing capabilities of fibre cables to help monitor harsh environments such as fusion reactors. Her internship project involved using machine learning to detect anomalous scenarios involving a lunar rover. Sofie is supervised by DWC members Rod Badcock and Dominic Moseley.
Marsden Fund 2025 Success
Our researchers and affiliate members are well-represented among the successful project recipients.
Some 107 projects have been announced by the Royal Society Te Apārangi and a total of $80.3 million has been invested in this round. Well done to Joachim Brand, Ulrich Zülicke, and Michele Governale; Stuart Murdoch, Stephane Coen and Miro Erkinato; Talia Xu; Keith Gordon; Nicholas Rattenbury and Simon Granville.
This year, two major interdisciplinary projects each received a $3m Marsden Fund Council Award and our Centre is proud to be playing a part in both of them. Keith Gordon is in the group led by Dr Phil Novis at the New Zealand Institute for Bioeconomy Science Limited which is studying the archaeological preservation of Māori rock art. And Nicholas Rattenbury is among the team led by Prof Renate Meyer at the University of Auckland exploring currently unseen components of the universe. Photonic and quantum technologies really do span so much of our lives.
A study of the behaviour of atoms at extreme temperatures has received a standard award of $941k over 3 years. The work is being led by Joachim Brand, with Ulrich Zülicke and Michele Governale. They’re collaborating with a wider team of researchers including those from Yale, the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
A project on visible laser combs (highly specialised measurement devices) led by Stuart Murdoch with Stephane Coen and Miro Erkinato received $941k over 3 years. In what is a terrific effort from a newly appointed Associate Investigator, Talia Xu and team were successful Fast Start award recipients of $360k over the same period to work on harnessing ambient light: a low-power solution for environmental sensor communication.
Finally, Affiliate Member Simon Granville, is collaborating with a team led by Dr John V Kennedy at Earth Sciences New Zealand to explore ways to recover and reuse waste heat energy from geothermal processes. The project won a standard award of $941k over 3 years and there’s considerable excitement about its potential.
The Dodd-Walls Centre research focus is photonics, the generation, transmission, and manipulation of light, and the study of matter and energy at the quantum level.