Our Research Team

Our team includes researchers at the University of Auckland, GNS, ESR and NIWA with expertise in microbiology, genomics, and geochemistry. Our field sampling work was also aided by help from staff at four regional councils (Auckland, Canterbury, Waikato and Wellington).

Dr Kim Handley

Dr Kim Handley

University of Auckland

Kim is the project’s principal investigator, and a microbial ecologist in the University of Auckland’s School of Biological Sciences. Her key focus is on omic (genomic and transcriptomic) analyses, and interpreting these data alongside geochemical data with PhD students Olivia and Emilie.

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Dr Louise Weaver

Dr Louise Weaver

ESR (Christchurch)

Louise is a eukaryotic-prokaryotic microbiologist and drinking water quality expert at ESR, and has experience in recovering RNA from aquifer, identification of agriculturally-derived pathogens, and pathogen transport mechanisms. Louise will contributes expertise in identifying groundwater health indicators using molecular techniques.

Dr Karen Houghton

Dr Karen Houghton

GNS (Wairakei)

Karen is a microbiologist at GNS. Her expertise is in microbial cultivation. Karen’s role in the project is to grow groundwater microorganisms in the lab in order to confirm and explore their metabolic functions. For example, some of Karen’s work is helping us to understand the range of conditions under which bacteria remove nitrogen from groundwater, and are thereby able to remediate nitrogen pollution.

Emilie Gios

Emilie Gios

University of Auckland

Emilie is a PhD candidate at the University of Auckland. She will be studying life habits of microorganims in groundwater and how anthropogenic perturbations such as nutrient input in the environment impact microbial communities by using a multi-omics approach. Her goal is to explore groundwater ecosystems and their metabolic potential, and try to understand how interconnected those metabolic processes are.

Murray Close

Murray Close

ESR (Christchurch)

Murray is a national groundwater quality expert with >90 peer-reviewed publications on groundwater quality and contamination. MC helped develop the MfE sponsored National Objectives Framework as part of the Groundwater Science Panel 2012-2013. Murray provides access to, and local expertise on, our proposed N-gradient wells, annually collected geochemical data, and facilitates sampling the sediment-attached and planktonic aquifer fractions using a novel sonication method.

Rob van der Raaij

Rob van der Raaij

GNS (Wellington)

Role on project: Measurement of microbial denitrification

Olivia Mosley

Olivia Mosley

University of Auckland

Olivia is a PhD student at the University of Auckland. She is interested in finding signature genes and organisms that are part of the nitrogen cycle in aquifer systems. Her main focus being nitrate pollution and how this effects the microbial communities. She aims to quantify gene expression and genomic potential across a survey of aquifers nationwide to test various hypotheses.

Dr Chris Daughney

Dr Chris Daughney

NIWA (Wellington)

Chris is Chief Science Advisor at NIWA, and prior to that was Principle Science Lead at the Ministry for the Environment, and Division Director of Environment and Materials at GNS. He is a geochemist and geomicrobiologist with extensive knowledge on nationwide aquifers and groundwater geochemistry. Chris produced the nationwide groundwater quality indicators consultancy reports for MfE (2009 and 2015), a national protocol for groundwater sampling for MfE (2006), and has a long track record of working on groundwater projects with the Greater Wellington Regional Council.

Heather Martindale

Heather Martindale

GNS (Wellington)

Role on project: Measurement of microbial denitrification