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 182 matching student topics
Displaying 25–36 of 182 results
Smart sensing for nutrients in our waterways: low-cost continuous monitoring for pollution tracking and real-time control
Nitrogen and phosphorus are central to the health of stormwater systems, rivers, wetlands, and lakes. They drive algal growth, oxygen stress, and downstream ecological impacts, and they are a key input to environmental reporting and catchment management. Yet most monitoring still relies on infrequent grab samples that miss the short pollution pulses that matter most.The challenge is delivering nutrient monitoring that is affordable, low-maintenance, and reliable enough for continuous deployment across many sites. Existing nutrient sensors are often too expensive …
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Learning complex dynamics from multimodal time-series data
Modelling non-stationary dynamics from high-frequency time-series data remains challenging. These signals often exhibit complex temporal and spectral structure, while observations are typically noisy, incomplete, and affected by changing operating conditions, making reliable prediction and representation learning difficult.This PhD project, offered at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in collaboration with industry partners, focuses on learning representations and dynamics from multimodal time-series data.The research will explore deep approaches including sequence models, transformer-based architectures, anomaly detection, graph neural networks, and self-supervised learning, with …
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics
Journey mapping student experiences in engineering education
This research topic explores the use of journey mapping as a research and design methodology to better understand, analyse and improve student experiences in engineering education. The project investigates how students navigate key stages and touchpoints across the academic lifecycle including transition into university, curriculum progression, assessment, engagement, wellbeing and career development. By systematically mapping these journeys, the research aims to reveal patterns, barriers, and opportunities that shape student engagement, experience and success.Situated at the intersection of engineering education research, …
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Educator capability development and recognition in engineering education
This research topic examines educator capability development and recognition in engineering education, with a particular focus on the misalignment between the skills increasingly required of educators and the ways those skills are formally recognised and rewarded in higher education.Building on contemporary scholarship in engineering education and academic career development, the project explores how expectations around teaching quality, digital capability, assessment design, and evidence‑based practice have expanded—while promotion, workload, and recognition frameworks have not always kept pace.The research aims to inform …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Mechanical, Medical and Process Engineering
Emerging technologies and data-driven learning in engineering education
This research topic explores the use of emerging technologies and data‑driven approaches to enhance learning and teaching in engineering education. The project investigates how diverse educational data sets can be leveraged to support evidence‑based decision making across multiple levels of the institution—from individual educators and course teams to faculty leaders and senior executives. The work sits at the intersection of engineering education, learning analytics, and strategic use of educational data to improve student engagement, experience, and success.
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Mechanical, Medical and Process Engineering
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Data Science
Advanced maintenance of railways
Effective maintenance of railway infrastructure is crucial for safe and comfortable transportation. Rail maintainers currently use a combination of time-based (scheduled) and condition-based approaches to balance the costs and benefits of inspections and maintenance.This project aims to enable advanced maintenance by advanced analysis of degradation patterns, establishment of new predictive models, and development of novel inspection and maintenance optimisation methods to efficiently allocate resources.
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Mechanical, Medical and Process Engineering
SLAM inside the human body: camera tracking and 3D reconstruction for medical procedures
Minimally invasive surgery and endoscopic interventions rely heavily on the clinician’s ability to understand and navigate complex internal anatomy using only a narrow and often restrictive field of view. Having access to an accurate and dynamic 3D reconstruction of the endoscopic scene, together with reliable camera pose estimation can significantly improve spatial awareness and navigation during procedures. The generated map can be used alongside the device’s estimated location to help clinicians better orient themselves within the patient, and it also …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics
Smart composite scaffolds for bone repair
Millions of people suffer bone loss each year through cancer excisions, traumatic accidents and congenital birth defectsThis project will develop advanced bioactive composite scaffolds to heal bone defects using a technology terms melt electrowriting. You will use a special kind of 3D printing to create scaffolds that stimulate bone cells (osteoblasts) to create new bone and will optimise the formulation, size, shape and culture conditions for the scaffolds.
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Mechanical, Medical and Process Engineering
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Biomedical Technologies
Centre for Biomedical Technologies
Development of foam concrete for fire-resistant walling elements
The need for fire safe buildings has emerged due to the increase in bushfires in many parts of the world. The walls are considered important as they act as barriers to fire propagation. This project will investigate the fire resistant performance of blocks made of foam concrete to construct internal and external wall panels for buildings against standard fire and bushfire resistance.The performance will be summarised based on the elevated thermal properties of foam concrete at the material level and …
- Study level
- Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Civil and Environmental Engineering
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Materials Science
Bushfire building risk assessment using advanced technologies
Bushfires often have detrimental impacts on both the natural and built environments. Although current building standards are in place to reduce the influence bushfire has on new buildings, existing and older residential properties are more susceptible to bushfire ignition.Identifying and restoring the most vulnerable features in existing properties can assist in reducing the property damage caused by bushfires. Implementing new technology into these risk assessments of existing bushfire-prone properties can reduce the time required and lower costs.As part of this …
- Study level
- Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Civil and Environmental Engineering
- Research centre(s)
- QUT Resilience Centre
Centre for the Environment
From digital design to human-robot collaborative masonry construction
This project addresses Queensland's critical housing shortage by exploring the productivity benefits of human-robot collaboration (HRC) in masonry construction. The research is conducted within the Building 4.0 CRC framework and leverages advanced facilities at QUT alongside industry partners such as Brickworks and the ARM Hub.By integrating collaborative robots (cobots), augmented reality (AR), parametric design tools (e.g. Grasshopper 3D), and AI algorithms, we aim to develop innovative workflows that enhance construction efficiency and material performance through the use of novel binders.
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Architecture and Built Environment
- Research centre(s)
- QUT Resilience Centre
Water living lab: flood modelling and visualisation
Smart use of rich data sets and state-of-the-art models in a central framework provides opportunities to address problems that were previously out of reach. This is particularly true in managing and responding to flood scenarios where an integrated platform can gather forecasted and measured weather and streamflow data and use those data in foresting systems, enabling an integrated visualisation platform for data sharing and real-time decision making.The water engineering research team is developing analytical and visualisation frameworks that can support …
- Study level
- Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Civil and Environmental Engineering
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