QUT offers a diverse range of student topics for Honours, Masters and PhD study. Search to find a topic that interests you or propose your own research topic to a prospective QUT supervisor. You may also ask a prospective supervisor to help you identify or refine a research topic.
Found 484 matching student topics
Displaying 13–24 of 484 results
Capture and reuse of phosphate nutrients
Nutrients such as ammonium and phosphate species are essential in agriculture. However, release of excessive amounts of nutrients to waterways may result in eutrophication which can lead to toxic algae blooms, killing of fish and destruction of the environment.Compounding this issue is the fact that phosphate rock sources are gradually being exhausted. Hence, finding a means to capture and reuse phosphate species from sources such as wastewater treatment plants is potentially attractive.Consequently, this project involves the development of new phosphate …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Mechanical, Medical and Process Engineering
Springbrook groundwater monitoring and modelling
In partnership with the City of Gold Coast, QUT has set up water monitoring networks in the Gold Coast Hinterland to improve assessment of water and ecological resources. You will have an opportunity to carry out research that leads to improved environmental management.
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Biology and Environmental Science
Understanding the role of the hSSB1 protein in the response to UV induced DNA damage
Melanoma is the 4th most common cancer in Australia. The link between skin cancer and UV exposure is now well established. If a DNA damage induced by UV exposure is left unrepaired, the mutation generated in the genome can lead to cell death or cancer. It is thus highly important to understand of how a cell can repair DNA damage. The main pathway to repair UV DNA damaged is the nucleotide excision repair pathway (NER) (Kamileri I. et al, Trends …
- Study level
- Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Health
- School
- School of Biomedical Sciences
Quantifying sedimentation on reefs using Google Earth Engine
Decreasing water quality is negativtly impacting coral reefs globally and is a threat that can be actively managed.
- Study level
- Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
- Research centre(s)
-
Centre for the Environment
Unleashing the full potential of terminators for the regulation of gene expression in plants
Ultimately, the proper development of a plant and its ability to adapt to its environment is the result of how plants’ genes are expressed and interact with each other. Hence, it is of extreme importance to understand the mechanisms used by plants to regulate gene expression.Modification of the expression pattern of a gene is particularly important in modern biology. By changing the expression levels of a gene, it is possible to learn about its function, increase the production of a …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Biology and Environmental Science
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Agriculture and the Bioeconomy
Facilitating gaining trust in AI
Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are automating service delivery in many sectors. Businesses have shown interest in using these technologies for delivering complex services in a way that meet the unique needs of customers. The technology gained more popularity particularly during Covid-19 outbreak, as it helped organisations to become more efficient in service delivery and increased service availability for customers / service applicants. However, gaining managers’ and users’ trust in these systems has always been a significant challenge. Particularly, managers and …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Information Systems
Gamified process-data cleaning
Despite the importance of data quality, it is often compromised. The majority of the time and energy in most data science projects is spent on data cleaning. Process-oriented data mining (process mining) is not an exception. A recent process mining survey shows that more than 60% of the time and effort is spent on data transformation and pre-processing. While, in most cases, the engagement of domain experts is required for accurate data cleaning, it is challenging to engage them in …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Information Systems
Praeclarus process-data quality framework
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
Playing Tetris with Australian threatened species
Many of Australia's threatened species can only avoid extinction if we keep them on islands or behind fences, where foxes and cats can't kill them all. We call these places "safe havens".Some species can only exist in some safe havens. Maybe they need particular habitats, or particular temperatures, and these can't be found everywhere.Some pairs of species can't live together. Maybe one is a predator of another. Maybe they fight too much.So, we need to find a way to put …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Mathematical Sciences
- Research centre(s)
-
Centre for the Environment
Optimisation of piezoelectric materials for robotics applications
Piezoelectricity, which translates to “pressure electricity”, is the phenomenon in which certain materials convert mechanical energy to electrical energy, and vice versa. Such materials are common-place and are used in a variety of applications including sensor, actuator, and energy harvesting technologies. The capabilities of such piezoelectric materials have not yet been fully realised. We plan to use computational structural optimisation to design new piezoelectric materials and components that may contribute to novel sensing technologies for robotics applications. Essentially, robots need …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Mathematical Sciences
Information retrieval and coding methods for large scale bioinformatics
Advances in sequencing technologies over the past two decades have led to an explosion in the availability of genomic sequence data and an increasingly urgent need for scalable clustering and search facilities. One approach is to encode sequences as binary vectors in a high-dimensional space, simplifying the comparison and allowing it to be computed very rapidly using bit-level operations.Coupled with these ideas is the need to provide clustering methods and efficient indexing and lookup in response to search queries. One …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Computer Science
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Data Science
Extraction and formulation of astaxanthin produced in Phaffia rhodozyma fermentations
Traditionally derived from unsustainable petrochemicals, astaxanthin (AX) can also be sustainably produced by microbial fermentation. The yeast Phaffia rhodozyma naturally produces AX as its main fermentation product through sugar assimilation.In previous studies, we improved the bioprocess to produce (upstream) AX in P. rhodozyma. This project aims to investigate the extraction, recovery, and formulation (downstream) of the AX produced in our improved AX production process.AX is a carotenoid pigment and potent antioxidant naturally occurring in some ocean animals such as salmonids …
- Study level
- Master of Philosophy
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Biology and Environmental Science
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Agriculture and the Bioeconomy
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