Student topics

Flexible electrothermal heaters have attracted a growing interest because of their broad applications in wearable electronics, including warming garments, and as flexural warmers for medical devices and vehicles. Traditional electrothermal materials such as ferro chromium (FeCr)-based alloys have disadvantages such as heavy weight, rigidity and low heating efficiency. Indium tin oxide (ITO) is widely used in commercial products due to its high transparency and high electrical conductivity. However, the finite reserve of indium has resulted in an increasing price of …

Study level

PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours

Faculty

Faculty of Science

School

School of Chemistry and Physics

NASA's newest Mars rover, Perseverance, has just arrived on the red planet. Tasked with searching for ancient life in the geological record of a ~4 billion-year-old crater lake, the mission science team must use our only available analogue - the Earth - as their guide to exploration.

Study level

PhD

Faculty

Faculty of Science

School

School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences

The architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry is known to have a fast-paced and demanding working environment. Companies operate in a competitive market with tight project deadlines. The stringent work environment is perceived as one of the main barriers in career progression for women and can be challenging for women to return to work after career interruptions.This project focuses on three big questions:What are the types of career interruption?What motivates women to return to work in the AEC sector?Do these “return-to-work” policies/work practices work?

Study level

Honours

Faculty

Faculty of Engineering

School

School of Architecture and Built Environment

Random walk models are often used to represent the motion of biological cells. These models are convenient because they allow us to capture randomness and variability. However, these approaches can be computationally demanding for large populations.One way to overcome the computational limitation of using random walk models is to take a continuum limit description, which can efficiently provide insight into the underlying transport phenomena.While many continuum limit descriptions for homogeneous random walk models are available, continuum limit descriptions for heterogeneous …

Study level

PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours

Faculty

Faculty of Science

School

School of Mathematical Sciences

Research centre(s)

Centre for Data Science

The health outcomes from traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) and concussion depend on the nature of the injury, but response also varies greatly between individuals, suggesting that genetic factors may play a role. In particular, due to effects of head trauma on balances of ions, neurotransmitters and energy use in the brain, there is suggestion that variation in the genes that encode proteins involved in these pathways, e.g. ion channels, may affect the risk of, as well as response to a …

Study level

PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours

Faculty

Faculty of Health

School

School of Biomedical Sciences

Our cellular DNA is constantly under threat from both exogenous and endogenous factors. DNA repair pathways function to maintain genomic stability, preventing deleterious mutations that may ultimately lead to cancer initiation. When a tumour forms, it becomes genetically unstable, allowing environmental adaptation. This genetic instability can also result in gene mutations and protein expression alterations that can be targeted to induce cancer-specific cell death (phenomenon also known as synthetic lethality). For example, it has been shown that cells deficient in …

Study level

Honours

Faculty

Faculty of Health

School

School of Biomedical Sciences

Permafrost thaw induced by climate change is predicted to make up to 174 Pg of near-surface carbon (less than 3m below the surface) available for microbial degradation by 2100. Despite having major implications for human health, prediction of the magnitude of carbon loss as carbon dioxide (CO2) or methane (CH4) is hampered by our limited knowledge of microbial metabolism of organic matter in these environments.Genome-centric meta-omic analysis of microbial communities provides the necessary information to examine how specific lineages transform …

Study level

PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours

Faculty

Faculty of Health

School

School of Biomedical Sciences

Research centre(s)

Centre for Microbiome Research

Prostate cancer is an androgen dependent cancer and treatments are aimed at preventing activation of the androgen receptor. Part of the development of resistance to therapies involves prostate cancers reprogramming their metabolism to overcome metabolic stress induced by these therapies and support growth and survival. This reprogramming involves increases in the rate of glycolysis and intermediate pathways branching from glycolysis. Previously in our laboratory, the natural compound, beta-carboline dimer, BD, was identified to have potent effects on cell viability, cell …

Study level

Master of Philosophy, Honours

Faculty

Faculty of Health

School

School of Biomedical Sciences

Extreme weather events can exacerbate slope and dam stability issues. Risk mitigation, stabilisation works, and engineered solutions to slope or dam failure require detailed site and subsurface characterisation – generally undertaken after a failure, but often resulting in unacceptable delays to remediation, impacting communities, transport, and water resources.This project will develop pre-emptive risk mitigation measures for at-risk sites, utilising remote sensing, geophysical, and monitoring approaches.

Study level

PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours

Faculty

Faculty of Science

School

School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences

The demand for 3D scene understanding through point clouds is rapidly growing in diverse applications, including augmented and virtual reality, autonomous driving, robotics, and environment monitoring. However, the field faces challenges due to limited data availability and predefined categories. Training deep 3D networks effectively for sparse LiDAR point clouds requires significant amounts of annotated data, which is both time-consuming and expensive. Building on the advancements in 2D models that leverage the power of image and language knowledge, our project aims …

Study level

PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours

School

School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics

Programming robots to carry out desired tasks is difficult and time-consuming. This PhD project focuses on collaborative and instructional dialogue agents to help human operators program robot tasks.In this collaborative scenario, a human operator converses with an AI agent to explain the steps that are to be performed, using high-level references and abstractions that make sense to the human, as opposed to simple verbal instructions corresponding to rudimentary robot movements. The AI agent must interpret the high-level instructions and translate …

Study level

PhD

School

School of Design

Research centre(s)

Design Lab

Carbon markets are recent social innovations of our modern economy. These national and international carbon markets are expected to play crucial roles in addressing climate change. There are many shortcomings of existing structures of the carbon markets. Rich literature discusses loopholes in these markets which undermine their ability to assist with global efforts of emission reduction and abatement. This project aims to discuss both theoretical and empirical issues relevant to these loopholes.

Study level

PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours

Faculty

Faculty of Business and Law

School

School of Economics and Finance

Research centre(s)

Centre for Agriculture and the Bioeconomy