title: Academic migrants in Aotearoa New Zealand: Acculturation experiences of long-term or permanent migrant teaching staff in a tertiary Institute of Technology

authors: Masterson, Maggie

abstract: International teaching staff are increasingly sought after by tertiary education providers in their drive to build institutional knowledge and research capacity.  While a growing body of research has examined the cultural, social and academic adjustment experiences of university academic staff moving to work in a new context, the experiences of staff working in other tertiary providers appear under-represented.

This multiple case study focuses on Aotearoa New Zealand’s Institutes of Technology and Polytechnics (ITP) sector and explores how the experience of migration impacts on four long-term or permanent academic staff with a range of industry, teaching and research experience.  The study identifies how political and economic circumstances in their country of origin and/or aspirations of a better lifestyle were initial drivers of migration.  Adapting to a new teaching and learning context and managing diverse student groups have created some professional challenges for these academic migrants.  While immigration status impacts how they articulate their experiences to date, they have experienced migration largely positively.  These international teaching staff were found to bring valuable industry insights and subject expertise, and to engage actively in curriculum development and research activities. The study highlights ways in which international teaching staff impact the institution, local staff and student population and is potentially of interest to anyone involved in recruiting and supporting overseas teaching professionals.

text: Academic migrants in Aotearoa New Zealand: Acculturation experiences of long-term or permanent migrant teaching staff in a tertiary Institute of Technology International teaching staff are increasingly sought after by tertiary education providers in their drive to build institutional knowledge and research capacity.  While a growing body of research has examined the cultural, social and academic adjustment experiences of university academic staff moving to work in a new context, the experiences of staff working in other tertiary providers appear under-represented.

This multiple case study focuses on Aotearoa New Zealand’s Institutes of Technology and Polytechnics (ITP) sector and explores how the experience of migration impacts on four long-term or permanent academic staff with a range of industry, teaching and research experience.  The study identifies how political and economic circumstances in their country of origin and/or aspirations of a better lifestyle were initial drivers of migration.  Adapting to a new teaching and learning context and managing diverse student groups have created some professional challenges for these academic migrants.  While immigration status impacts how they articulate their experiences to date, they have experienced migration largely positively.  These international teaching staff were found to bring valuable industry insights and subject expertise, and to engage actively in curriculum development and research activities. The study highlights ways in which international teaching staff impact the institution, local staff and student population and is potentially of interest to anyone involved in recruiting and supporting overseas teaching professionals.

year: 2020

title: Quiescence induces epigenetic changes in bovine fibroblasts and improves their reprogramming into cloned embryos

authors: Kallingappa, Prasanna Kumar

subjects: Quiescence, Epigenetics, Reprogramming, Somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), Histone Methylation, Histone Acetylation, Histone varients, DNA methylation, Polycomb group (PcG) proteins

abstract: Cloning by somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) forces cells to lose their lineage-specific epigenetic marks and become totipotent again. This reprogramming process often results in epigenetic and transcriptional aberrations that compromise development. Development rates after SCNT can thus serve as a functional assay for genome-wide epigenetic reprogramming. Dolly the sheep, the first mammalian SCNT clone, was derived from a donor cell that was induced into quiescence by serum starvation. We hypothesized that quiescence alters the epigenetic status of donor cells and elevates their reprogrammability. In order to test this idea, we compared chromatin composition and cloning efficiency of serum-starved, quiescent (G₀), bovine fibroblasts vs non-starved, diploid G₁ controls. Mechanically synchronized G₁ cells were generated by mitotic shake-off and harvested within 3 h post-mitosis. Based on morphological assessment and EdU incorporation during continuous labeling, >93% of cells were captured in G₁.
Using quantitative confocal immunofluorescence microscopy and fluorometric ELISA, we show that G₀ fibroblasts were significantly hypomethylated at lysines (K) of histone 3 (H3), specifically H3K4me3, H3K9me2, H3K9me3 and H3K27me3, but not H3K9me1. Histone acetylation was reduced at H3K9 and H4K5, increased at H3K12 and remained unchanged at H3K16. G₀ cells also significantly reduced DNAme. In addition, they significantly down-regulated the nuclear abundance of RNA polymerase II, histone variant H2A.Z, as well as Polycomb group (PcG) proteins EED, SUZ12, PHC1 and RING2. Histone variant H3.3, PcG proteins EZH2 and histone deacetylase HDAC1 did not change compared to the G₁ controls. Following NT into metaphase-arrested oocytes, G₀ DNA condensed slower than that of G₁ cells, indicating a more relaxed chromatin configuration. After seven days of in vitro culture, H3K9me3, but not H3K4me3, H3K27me3, SUZ12 and RING2, remained hypomethylated in G₀- vs G₁-derived NT blastocysts, both in the inner cell mass and trophectoderm. Furthermore, G₀ donors significantly improved development into cloned blastocysts. In conclusion, quiescence induced long-term epigenetic changes, specifically H3K9me3 hypomethylation, that correlated with increased donor cell reprogrammability.

text: Quiescence induces epigenetic changes in bovine fibroblasts and improves their reprogramming into cloned embryos Cloning by somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT) forces cells to lose their lineage-specific epigenetic marks and become totipotent again. This reprogramming process often results in epigenetic and transcriptional aberrations that compromise development. Development rates after SCNT can thus serve as a functional assay for genome-wide epigenetic reprogramming. Dolly the sheep, the first mammalian SCNT clone, was derived from a donor cell that was induced into quiescence by serum starvation. We hypothesized that quiescence alters the epigenetic status of donor cells and elevates their reprogrammability. In order to test this idea, we compared chromatin composition and cloning efficiency of serum-starved, quiescent (G₀), bovine fibroblasts vs non-starved, diploid G₁ controls. Mechanically synchronized G₁ cells were generated by mitotic shake-off and harvested within 3 h post-mitosis. Based on morphological assessment and EdU incorporation during continuous labeling, >93% of cells were captured in G₁.
Using quantitative confocal immunofluorescence microscopy and fluorometric ELISA, we show that G₀ fibroblasts were significantly hypomethylated at lysines (K) of histone 3 (H3), specifically H3K4me3, H3K9me2, H3K9me3 and H3K27me3, but not H3K9me1. Histone acetylation was reduced at H3K9 and H4K5, increased at H3K12 and remained unchanged at H3K16. G₀ cells also significantly reduced DNAme. In addition, they significantly down-regulated the nuclear abundance of RNA polymerase II, histone variant H2A.Z, as well as Polycomb group (PcG) proteins EED, SUZ12, PHC1 and RING2. Histone variant H3.3, PcG proteins EZH2 and histone deacetylase HDAC1 did not change compared to the G₁ controls. Following NT into metaphase-arrested oocytes, G₀ DNA condensed slower than that of G₁ cells, indicating a more relaxed chromatin configuration. After seven days of in vitro culture, H3K9me3, but not H3K4me3, H3K27me3, SUZ12 and RING2, remained hypomethylated in G₀- vs G₁-derived NT blastocysts, both in the inner cell mass and trophectoderm. Furthermore, G₀ donors significantly improved development into cloned blastocysts. In conclusion, quiescence induced long-term epigenetic changes, specifically H3K9me3 hypomethylation, that correlated with increased donor cell reprogrammability.

year: 2013

title: Ghost Town

authors: Wrigley, David

abstract: Abstract

A hometown is a thing full of horrors.
Ghosts line the footpaths like spectators at an ANZAC Day parade. They leap from thickets and pounce from suburban ranch sliders like tom cats. 
These ghosts have been waiting for you. There are things they need you to remember. 
When David Wrigley returns to Cambridge, a town he thought he’d left behind him forever, he finds the ghosts are out in force. He stumbles on a note in his mother’s garage, tightly folded and hot to the touch, that sets him off in pursuit of the memory of Jacob Avonlea, a friend from the past who he has never been able to leave behind.
But the currents of memory are unpredictable, and the waters and riverbanks are crowded with the dead. David and Jacob’s friendship, which crackled with a boyish intensity and a surfeit of secrets, was just the first of many stories tussling for attention.
 There is a family history – a fifty year old cataclysm that destroyed his brother. 
The grotesque origins of the school that nurtured David and murdered Jacob. The eccentric founder who brought with him from the mill towns of Manchester a fear of women and a predilection for young boys. 
And then there is the land – the meanders of the Waikato and the eruptions that diverted it from one coast to another, leaving forgotten oxbows in its wake. The roaming forests of kahikateas that followed the river and the wetlands, and once dominated these landscapes but have now all but disappeared. The rich farmland that has usurped the forests and slowly leaks poison into the soil and the waterways.
Ghost Town is a psychogeographer’s novel. A novel in which the landscape and the people that live and act upon it are inseparable, the ghosts of one haunting the present of the other.  It is a story of colonial men, locked into cycles of violence and destruction. The story of the silence they have inflicted upon themselves and on their children, and ultimately on the landscape itself, as the forests retreat, the birdsong hushed.
As we drift downstream, at every bend of the river we can see through the ever-widening gaps in the trees, glimpses of lost futures– that different species of ghost. 
A free and autonomous Māori Waikato. 
A spring-fed lake full of eels and koura. 
Five hundred year old kahikateas growing arrow-straight into the distant blueness.
An egalitarian, socialist Aotearoa. 
A family man gathering his sons into his arms.
A man of forty six raising his eyes towards the swaying tree-tops and starting to sing.

text: Ghost Town Abstract

A hometown is a thing full of horrors.
Ghosts line the footpaths like spectators at an ANZAC Day parade. They leap from thickets and pounce from suburban ranch sliders like tom cats. 
These ghosts have been waiting for you. There are things they need you to remember. 
When David Wrigley returns to Cambridge, a town he thought he’d left behind him forever, he finds the ghosts are out in force. He stumbles on a note in his mother’s garage, tightly folded and hot to the touch, that sets him off in pursuit of the memory of Jacob Avonlea, a friend from the past who he has never been able to leave behind.
But the currents of memory are unpredictable, and the waters and riverbanks are crowded with the dead. David and Jacob’s friendship, which crackled with a boyish intensity and a surfeit of secrets, was just the first of many stories tussling for attention.
 There is a family history – a fifty year old cataclysm that destroyed his brother. 
The grotesque origins of the school that nurtured David and murdered Jacob. The eccentric founder who brought with him from the mill towns of Manchester a fear of women and a predilection for young boys. 
And then there is the land – the meanders of the Waikato and the eruptions that diverted it from one coast to another, leaving forgotten oxbows in its wake. The roaming forests of kahikateas that followed the river and the wetlands, and once dominated these landscapes but have now all but disappeared. The rich farmland that has usurped the forests and slowly leaks poison into the soil and the waterways.
Ghost Town is a psychogeographer’s novel. A novel in which the landscape and the people that live and act upon it are inseparable, the ghosts of one haunting the present of the other.  It is a story of colonial men, locked into cycles of violence and destruction. The story of the silence they have inflicted upon themselves and on their children, and ultimately on the landscape itself, as the forests retreat, the birdsong hushed.
As we drift downstream, at every bend of the river we can see through the ever-widening gaps in the trees, glimpses of lost futures– that different species of ghost. 
A free and autonomous Māori Waikato. 
A spring-fed lake full of eels and koura. 
Five hundred year old kahikateas growing arrow-straight into the distant blueness.
An egalitarian, socialist Aotearoa. 
A family man gathering his sons into his arms.
A man of forty six raising his eyes towards the swaying tree-tops and starting to sing.

year: 2023