Student topics

Many environmental issues are globally significant problems and countries have to engage and interact with each other to resolve them despite having different domestic priorities. Current challenges around climate, land degradation, biodiversity loss, and plastics are just some of the issues that are influenced by international standards, agreements and institutions.

Study level

PhD, Master of Philosophy

Faculty

Faculty of Business and Law

School

School of Law

I am interested in supervising students with a high level of commitment and ambition to publish on top academic journals.My interests are around international entrepreneurship (international business and also entrepreneurship), emerging markets, innovation, and digitalisation.Topics that include two or more of these fields are of my interest, and I would be keen to see your proposal and work with you on shaping it to a high standard.

Study level

PhD

Faculty

Faculty of Business and Law

School

School of Management

Research centre(s)

Australian Centre for Entrepreneurship Research

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

Faculty

Faculty of Creative Industries, Education and Social Justice

School

School of Design

Research centre(s)

Design Lab

How can robots best learn to navigate in challenging environments and execute complex tasks, such as tidying up an apartment or assist humans in their everyday domestic chores?Often, hand-written architectures are based on complicated state machines that become intractable to design and maintain with growing task complexity. I am interested in developing learning-based approaches that are effective and efficient and scale better to complicated tasks.Especially learning based on semantic information (such as extracted by the research in semantic SLAM above), …

Study level

PhD

Faculty

Faculty of Engineering

School

School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics

The recent COVID-19 pandemic reminds us of how difficult it is to control infectious diseases. Pathogenic microorganisms are known to be extremely 'smart' and are able to quickly develop mechanisms against most of our strategies aimed at eradicating them. Our group is focused on bacterial infections to implants and medical devices. We are in the pursuit to outsmart the bacteria to develop the next generation medical device and implant materials.Anthony Gristina conceptualized in 1987 that bacteria compete with tissue cells …

Study level

PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours

Faculty

Faculty of Engineering

School

School of Mechanical, Medical and Process Engineering

Research centre(s)

Centre for Biomedical Technologies

As airway infections become pandemic worldwide, airway models to investigate pathogen infection mechanism and nasal drug delivery is now increasingly important. However, current airway models cannot mimic the triad coupling of human nasal anatomical geometries, aerosol flow and biological responses (e.g. infection and inflammation) from the nasal epithelium.Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models are used for simulating pathological airflow patterns resulting from anatomical structural changes of the nasal cavities, but they cannot measure phenotypic or functional alterations in the nasal epithelium …

Study level

PhD, Master of Philosophy

Faculty

Faculty of Engineering

School

School of Mechanical, Medical and Process Engineering

Research centre(s)

Centre for Biomedical Technologies

Virtual reality (VR) technologies have become cheaper and more accessible in the last couple of years. This allowed for exploring their use in different areas including gaming, health, education and training settings.While VR can provide high immersion via augmenting our senses in the virtual environment, user interaction with the virtual environment has been limited relying on pre-set gestures or default controllers designed by the companies who built the VR gears.The Vive Tracker is an accessory for HTC Vive which allows …

Study level

PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours

Faculty

Faculty of Science

School

School of Computer Science

To meet the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5C, methane emissions from ruminants such as beef and dairy cattle must be reduced by 11–30% by 2030 and by 24–47% by 2050 compared to 2010 levels. A newly funded Future Fellowship project is hiring 2 PhD students who will tackle this challenge by creating a thorough mechanistic understanding of the microbiological, biochemical and genetic processes that cause methanogenesis in the cow rumen. These activities will identify core beneficial microbiota that …

Study level

PhD

Faculty

Faculty of Health

School

School of Biomedical Sciences

Research centre(s)

Centre for Microbiome Research

The World Health Organisation recently raised the alarm on the critical importance of physical activity and social interactions for mental and physical health, highlighting the need for active environments that support people to engage in healthy activities. In order to address the high-rates of physical inactivity and social isolation, we need additional research evidence to design high-quality public spaces that promote health and wellbeing for all ages. This study lies at the intersection of built environment, human behaviour, and health …

Study level

PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours

Faculty

Faculty of Engineering

School

School of Architecture and Built Environment

This project seeks to explore the complex dynamics that might arise from multiple interacting feedbacks in marine ecosystems, by designing ordinary and/or partial differential equation models of these feedbacks and analysing the steady states and/or temporal dynamics of the proposed model(s).It has been hypothesised that many social and ecological systems exhibit alternative stable states due to feedback processes that keep the ecosystem in one state or the other. The result can be tipping points, which are difficult to predict but …

Study level

PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours

Faculty

Faculty of Science

School

School of Mathematical Sciences

Research centre(s)

Centre for Data Science
Centre for the Environment

Antarctica is governed by a coalition of 29 countries ('consultative parties') who must agree unanimously before a law can be passed. This project will apply theories from social network analysis and cooperative game theory to map relationships between the different parties, and to predict their behaviour on a series of important environmental issues.

Study level

PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours

Faculty

Faculty of Science

School

School of Mathematical Sciences

Research centre(s)

Centre for the Environment

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