QUT Science and Engineering leads the way for research
QUT is the leading Australian institution in four research fields and hosts six research field leaders according to The Australian’s annual research magazine.
First published 16 November 2018
Three of those research fields and four of the research field leaders sit within QUT Science and Engineering Faculty (SEF), one of the largest science faculties anywhere in Australia.
The magazine, Research, recognised QUT physicist Dr Jennifer MacLeod as a leader in nanotechnology science in Australia.
Dr MacLeod told The Australian that she and her team are working to understand how materials behave at the atomic level and the process of linking individual molecules together.
“There is not a whole lot of instrumentation in the world that can examine the electronic properties of individual molecules and one of the things I am doing is building new characterisation equipment so that we can understand the materials we grow in a more profound way," she said.
Dr MacLeod explained how the support within her discipline helps lead towards higher quality research.
"There’s a really supportive and collegial atmosphere within my home discipline of Nanoscience. We’re focused on creating community and collaboration amongst our researchers and particularly amongst our higher degree by research students, which I think is a really positive route towards strengthening our research programs in general."
Research recognised three other SEF researchers as leaders:
It listed SEF as a leader in the following research fields.
Transportation
Biomedical Technology
Databases & Information Systems.
Professor Huai Yong Zhu, from QUT's School of Chemistry, Physics and Mechanical Engineering, heads a world-leading group in photocatalysis of metal nanoparticles.
“Since joining QUT, my team have contributed half the papers from QUT that have been published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society and two-thirds of the papers published in the Angewandt Chemie International Edition,” he said.
“It would have been impossible to achieve all of these results without the support we’ve received.
“QUT bought a $50,000, 5-litre hydrothermal reactor to help us complete a series of commercial projects of sorbents for extraction of lithium from brine."
CEO and co-founder of League of Scholar Paul McCarthy, co-authored this year's Research with The Australian's higher education editor, Tim Dodd.
He told The Australian the field-leading researchers and institutions were selected based on the amount of papers published in the top 20 journals in their field.
“This recognises both their career output and, since it is limited to the top publication venues, the quality of their work as recognised by their peers worldwide. For institutions, we selected those with most impact, that is citations, from papers in the top 20 journals in each field in the past year.”
A new way to analyse the effects of conservation actions on complex ecosystems has cut the modelling time from 108 days to six hours, QUT statisticians have found.
QUT scientists have developed a deep learning framework to detect shoulder abnormalities such as fractures in X-ray images with 99 per cent accuracy to enable clinicians to make correct and speedy decisions in emergency situations.