Travel award for health research revamped for sustainability

A long-running travel research scholarship has been redesigned and relaunched with sustainability in mind.

For more than 50 years, until Covid-19 led to lockdowns, the Sir John Logan Campbell Medical Trust promoted international travel to further health research for early career researchers and doctoral students.

Over this period, hundreds of staff and students were enabled to attend overseas conferences, workshops and meetings to further medical knowledge and foster research collaborations.

However, in 2020, the Sir John Logan Campbell Medical Trust suspended its travel grants for the first time due to the pandemic.

Now, in 2024, the Sir John Logan Campbell Medical Committee along with the Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences decided, in the interests of sustainability, to relaunch the travel grants, with fewer grants available for longer periods.

Prior to Covid-19, the trust offered up to 20 travel awards per annum compared with up to five awards of $10,000 to $25,000 available annually now.

The revamped Sir John Logan Campbell Travelling Fellowships will allow research staff and students to undertake substantive travel internationally and be based overseas for a period of up to three months to pursue a concentrated and extended period of study.

“These new awards recognise the need for more intensive and extended research collaborations with our international colleagues, which will accentuate advances in research in Aotearoa,” says Professor Trevor Sherwin, Associate Dean (Postgraduate Research) at in the Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences at Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland.

“The awards have been restructured to reflect the University’s changing values, in particular, for more sustainable travel practices and the need to optimise the purpose and outputs of travel undertaken on the University’s behalf,” Trevor says.

Surgeon, merchant and mayor of Auckland city, Sir John Logan Campbell willed that his residuary estate be invested and distributed annually “for the relief of distress, alleviation of suffering and education thereof”.  

John Duncan, chair of the Medical Trust, says “The trustees are pleased to resume a reshaped and substantial programme of travel grants to further medical knowledge for the benefit of all New Zealanders.”