The Health Research Council of New Zealand (HRC) recognises that improvement in Pacific health and wellbeing continues to be one of the government's main health gain areas. The HRC contributes to improving Pacific health through funding and supporting high quality research and investing in the Pacific health research workforce.
The HRC is pleased to announce a new Pacific Career Development Award named The Sir Thomas Davis Te Patu Kite Rangi Ariki Health Research Fellowship to support high quality Pacific health research in priority areas. The fellowship will contribute towards achieving better health outcomes for Pacific people, families and communities.
This award recognises the contributions that Sir Davis LLD honoris causa, DTM and H, MBChB, MPH, MD honoris causa, has made to clinical practice and biomedical and public health research, in a distinguished career spanning 62 years in the Cook Islands, New Zealand and the United States of America. Sir Davis was born on the island of Rarotonga on June 11, 1917 and educated at King's College in Auckland. He gained his medical degree at Otago in 1945 before returning to the Cook Islands where he was the chief medical officer from 1949. After working in the Cook Islands for several years he carried out further studies at Harvard University and completed a Masters of Public Health. He worked for various sections of the USA armed forces as a research physiologist before joining the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to work on the space programme. During an academic career, that covered a wide range of scientific subjects, including biomedical aspects of the space programme, he published two books and more than 60 scientific papers. Sir Davis was knighted in 1981. He was the Prime Minister of the Cook Islands from 1978 to 1987. In 2005 the University of Otago awarded him an honorary Doctor of Laws degree.
The application form and guidelines for the Sir Thomas Davis Te Patu Kite Rangi Ariki Health Research Fellowship are available here.
Full applications open on 2 July, 2014. Full applications close on 2 September, 2014.