Te Whai Ao -Dodd-Walls Centre (DWC) is a national Centre of Research Excellence (CoRE) involving six universities in New Zealand and partner institutions in the USA, United Kingdom, and Singapore. The DWC is managed from the University of Otago which is ranked 151 globally by QS. The DWC has 224 members, approximately half of whom are research students. Research income includes base CoRE funding from the New Zealand Tertiary Education Commission along with other funding from government and private sector companies. We partner with companies to solve operational problems and develop new products, and we create our own IP for commercialization through fundamental research.