Student topics

Sonographers, highly skilled healthcare professionals responsible for essential diagnostic ultrasound services, are currently facing a severe nationwide shortage. The Australasian Sonographers Association reported a deficit of at least 3,000 sonographers in 2019. Training new sonographers involves comprehensive work-integrated learning (WIL), which blends academic knowledge with structured real-world experiences to develop vital clinical skills. However, due to escalating workforce demands, concerns have arisen about potential exploitation of students within workplaces. This exploitation could involve assigning tasks exceeding their capabilities or subjecting …

Study level

PhD, Master of Philosophy

School

School of Clinical Sciences

Expansive soil/active soil has wide applications in geotechnical engineering and other engineering disciplines due to its desirable special properties - for example, low permeability and swelling pressure under saturated condition. But these materials are highly susceptible to experiencing huge volume change and even damage due to moisture content reduction. However, the underlying mechanism of this phenomenon is still not clear for geotechnical engineers. Therefore, there is no optimum solution available to solve the problem.In this project, a special modelling approach …

Study level

PhD, Master of Philosophy

Faculty

Faculty of Engineering

School

School of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Research centre(s)

Centre for Materials Science

Networks have been extensively used to capture social interactions, by representing individuals as nodes and their relationships as edges.Such networks have been used to model the spread of epidemics. A few nodes are 'infected', and over time they gradually infect their neighbours on the network, who in turn infect their neighbours, etc. This type of model can then be used to simulate different intervention strategies aimed at containing outbreaks.However, an important limitation is the difficulty to visualise these networks when …

Study level

PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours

Faculty

Faculty of Science

School

School of Computer Science

Research centre(s)

Centre for Data Science

Praeclarus is an open-source software framework that aims to facilitate data pre-processing for process mining. Process mining is specialised data mining focusing on process-data. It is of high interest to industry, with the market doubling every two years (e.g., increasing from $550M in 2020 to $1B in 2022). This market increase has meant that big companies like Microsoft, SAP, and IBM are acquiring process mining vendors such is Minit, Signavio, and myInvenio.Recent process mining surveys show that more than 60% …

Study level

PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours

Faculty

Faculty of Science

School

School of Information Systems

This PhD project aims to develop new methods for generating random samples from a specific type of probability distributions called simplex-truncated distributions. These distributions are commonly used in various fields such as statistics, machine learning, and biology.The project will involve the development of new techniques to generate random samples from simplex-truncated distributions. These techniques are based on a method called continuous-time Monte Carlo which is a cutting edge method in statistics that can generate random samples from complex distributions.The main …

Study level

Master of Philosophy, Honours

Faculty

Faculty of Science

School

School of Mathematical Sciences

Research centre(s)

Centre for Data Science

Air travel is poised for systemic transformation due to the advent and implementation of emerging technologies. For example, electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft have the potential to deliver sustainable, efficient, and fast, short-range mobility in urban environments. Advances in fuel and propulsion systems, such as those used in hydrogen electric aircraft, could have broader impact, delivering aspirations of zero carbon aviation.Given the nascent qualities of such technology advances, it is unclear how they will affect passenger experience. Currently, air …

Study level

PhD

Faculty

Faculty of Creative Industries, Education and Social Justice

School

School of Design

Research centre(s)

Design Lab

Prostate cancer is the most frequently occurring cancer (after skin cancers) in Australian males, and the second most common cause of cancer death. While the 5-year survival rate for localised disease approaches 100%, extra-prostatic invasion results in a poorer prognosis. Kallikreins are serine proteases, which are part of an enzymatic cascade pathway activated in prostate cancer (Lawrence et al 2010). The most well-known member is prostate specific antigen (PSA) or the KLK3 protein, encoded by the Kallikrein 3 (KLK3) gene, …

Study level

PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours

Faculty

Faculty of Health

School

School of Biomedical Sciences

Current clinical prostate cancer screening is heavily reliant on measuring serum prostate specific antigen (PSA) levels. However, two-thirds of these men will not have cancer on biopsy and conversely, other prostate diseases. As a result, for ~75% of patients the large number of indolent tumours diagnosed has led to significant overtreatment creating an urgent need for appropriate prognostic assays that can distinguish indolent, slow growing tumours from the more aggressive and lethal phenotypes. PSA/KLK3 is a member of the tissue-kallikrein …

Study level

PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours

Faculty

Faculty of Health

School

School of Biomedical Sciences

OverviewProstate cancer (PCa) is the second-most common cancer in men. Prostate-specific antigen (PSA) encoded by the KLK3 gene is the only FDA-approved PCa biomarker for PCa. As a serine protease, PSA can also regulate multiple functions involved in PCa progression and metastasis and is summarised in our recent publications. Immunotherapies, including PSA-targeting therapies, have shown modest improvement in survival, for only a subset of metastatic PCa patients. Not much is known on the immunoregulatory role of PSA or its variants, …

Study level

PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours

Faculty

Faculty of Health

School

School of Biomedical Sciences

Research centre(s)

Centre for Genomics and Personalised Health

Study level

PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours

Faculty

Faculty of Science

School

School of Mathematical Sciences

Research centre(s)

Centre for Data Science

This project aims to explore the identification and properties of accreting supermassive black holes, commonly known as active galactic nuclei (AGN), by cross-matching the FourStar Galaxy Evolution Survey (ZFOURGE) with the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) data. Using WISE infrared colors to pinpoint AGNs and comparing these findings with results from the spectral energy distribution (SED) decomposition on ZFOURGE data, you will enhance AGN identification techniques and deepen our understanding of their physical characteristics. This comparative approach will improve our …

Study level

Vacation research experience scheme

School

School of Chemistry and Physics

Solar panel efficiency is calculated using standardised testing conditions, allowing like-for-like comparison of systems under the same conditions. However, data collected over a three year period from two collocated solar systems of different technologies are showing unexpected results. The most efficient system's yearly output is comparatively lower. Initial data analysis explains some differences from the operational conditions, but further investigation is required.

Study level

Honours

Faculty

Faculty of Engineering

School

School of Mechanical, Medical and Process Engineering

Research centre(s)

Centre for Clean Energy Technologies and Practices