Royal Society honours five academics as new fellows

Twenty-one new Ngā Ahurei Fellows have been elected to the Academy of the Royal Society Te Apārangi, including five academics from Waipapa Taumata Rau University of Auckland.

Fellowship recognises researchers, scholars and innovators throughout Aotearoa New Zealand who have achieved excellence in their various disciplines across science, technology, and the humanities.

Elected for intellectual leadership on gendered social relations and development studies in the Pacific.

Professor Yvonne Underhill-Sem (MNZM DNZG FPAS) is a Pacific Studies and Geography scholar of Cook Islands, Niuean and Pākehā descent. She has been instrumental in establishing Pacific feminist development geography as a critical field in social sciences, based on Pacific research.

Underhill-Sem has transformed scholarly understandings of the gendered nature of the diverse connections of people and place, and has dedicated her career to advancing fairer, more inclusive spaces.

She has drawn sustained attention to how practices and narratives of sexism, racism, colonisation and economic inequality continue to shape Pacific communities. Her work has significantly deepened understanding of gender relations, embodiment, Indigeneity and coloniality across the Pacific, including in Aotearoa New Zealand.

She is also attuned to the daily realities of Pacific communities and recently co-led a seven-country study examining the impacts of climate change on the mobility of Pacific people.

Elected for his research of complex international taxation issues.

Professor Craig Elliffe is a global leader in international taxation law. His most recent works addressed widespread public and government concern about the light tax burden on companies operating in the digital economy. Ensuring that multinationals pay appropriate levels of tax when doing business in Aotearoa New Zealand will contribute significantly to the future well-being of every citizen.

Elliffe’s research illuminates the challenges embedded in the international tax system and identifies ways to remedy them through international and domestic reform. His work is frequently cited in New Zealand courts and has helped guide government tax policy through working groups.

He is an acknowledged expert in tax treaty interpretation and the first New Zealander to serve on the Permanent Scientific Committee of the International Fiscal Association and as a General Reporter to its congress.

Elected for being a leader in wireless power transfer and advanced power electronics.

Professor Aiguo Patrick Hu is an internationally recognised leader in wireless power transfer, a technology that enables power delivery without electrical contacts.

His research focuses on developing innovative power conversion and control methods to enable safe, efficient, and cost-effective wireless power supply technologies. His work connects deep theoretical understanding with practical engineering solutions. Hu's pioneering breakthroughs – the autonomous push-pull resonant converter and a novel resonant detection method – have generated significant intellectual property and have been adopted by industry for implantable medical devices, consumer electronics, and industrial equipment, such as wireless charging systems for wind turbines and mobile phones.

Elected for leading research in the field of optimisation in electricity markets and other industries.

Professor Andy Philpott,  an INFORMS Fellow,  is an engineer whose theoretical and practical development of techniques and models for ‘stochastic optimisation’ – a framework for solving optimisation problems where the parameters are random – has been used to decarbonise and cheapen electricity in several countries.

Philpott's techniques are particularly important to the electricity industry, where there is unavoidable uncertainty in the demand for electricity. His techniques have saved energy companies and consumers money by helping companies make better operational and capital planning decisions.

Currently, his work in electricity market modelling is applied in New Zealand, Chile, Brazil, France, and Canada. His techniques have also been used for route planning in yacht racing, the pulp and paper industry, and the rollout of broadband in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Elected for pioneering research and utilisation of bi-directional wireless power flow.

Professor Udaya Madawal,  who is also a Fellow of the IEEE (US), has made pioneering contributions to bidirectional wireless power transfer (WPT) technology.

Conventional WPT systems allow only one-way transfer of electrical energy and are widely used in current applications. Professor Madawala’s research has fundamentally advanced this field by enabling two-way wireless energy flow, allowing devices to seamlessly exchange electrical energy without physical connections.

This breakthrough has laid the foundation for emerging wireless anything-to-anything (X2X) applications, including phone-to-phone charging and vehicle-to-grid (V2G) and vehicle-to-building (V2B) energy systems. His contributions span theoretical development, system design, practical implementation, licensing, and global industry partnerships, covering all facets of the research-to-impact chain.