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 130 matching student topics
Displaying 109–120 of 130 results
Understanding how self-image and compassionate goals affect well-being in a social media context
There is increasing concern about the negative impact of social media use on well-being. To understand its impact, we need to move beyond simple conceptualisations of social media use and utilise strong research methods to understand the role that psychological processes play in producing positive and negative impacts. There is preliminary evidence that interpersonal goals play an important role in predicting how people use and experience social media. Self-image goals involve trying to convey a desirable image of oneself to …
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Health
- School
- School of Psychology and Counselling
The Emotional Face
Faces are a rich source of social information communicating social categories like sex, age or ethnicity of a person, but also a person’s emotional state via facial expressions of emotion. The current research investigates how cues available on a face (social category cues, attractiveness, trustworthiness) or what we know about a person affect the manner in which we process emotional expressions.
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Health
- School
- School of Psychology and Counselling
Human Emotional Learning: Likes, Dislikes and Fear
There is currently broad agreement that likes and dislikes, including strong emotional responses such as fear and anxiety, are learned. However, little is known about the manner in which different forms of emotional learning interact or about how emotional learning once acquired can be modified, reduced or eliminated. In particular in the context of fear learning this is problematic as fear memories once acquired seem difficult to change and likely to return even after successful extinction – a phenomenon known …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Health
- School
- School of Psychology and Counselling
Exploring chemotherapy-induced molecular aging and its relationship to exercise
Ovarian cancer is the sixth most common cause of death from cancer in women, with a five-year survival rate of less than 45 per cent. However, there is emerging research that shows the benefits of exercise therapy during recovery following certain cancer treatments, and how exercise can improve and extend the lives of women with ovarian cancer.This project is a collaboration exploring these health and survival outcomes in ovarian and other gynaecological cancers, and in particular how new diagnostic testing …
- Study level
- Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Health
- School
- School of Biomedical Sciences
Why do epithelial cells have antigen processing machinery?
Epithelial Cells (ECs) constitute the border between the host immune system and an environment teeming with inhaled antigens. Work from us and others has highlighted that ECs have the ability to express the antigen processing and presentation machinery, Major Histocompatibility Complex class II (MHC II) that is important in initiating immune responses. MHC II expression and function on mucosal epithelial cells, is not well understood.Whilst MHC II is expressed by ECs, and is altered with inflammation, there is a paucity …
- Study level
- Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Health
- School
- School of Biomedical Sciences
Interaction between pollen proteases and ACE2 receptor of SARS-CoV-2
Pollen allergy is a common seasonal respiratory disease triggered by hypersensitivity to pollen affecting 10-30% of adults and 40% of children, and is a predisposing factor for asthma. Pollens interact with airway epithelium to both stimulate innate immunity and elicit an adaptive immune response.Proteolytic activity is one route that stimulates release of alarmins and pro-inflammatory cytokines from mucosal epithelia. Previous studies have found the expression of Serine/Cysteine (Ser/Cys) proteases in some types of grass pollen grains, but it is not …
- Study level
- Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Health
- School
- School of Biomedical Sciences
Engineering the prostate tumour microenvironment in organ-on-a-chip systems
Prostate cancer remains one of the leading causes of global death. The tumour microenvironment (TME) including blood vessels, immune cells, fibroblasts, and the extracellular matrix (ECM) possesses disease-specific biophysical and biological factors that are difficult to recapitulate using conventional in vitro cell culture models.The absence of these factors, however, causes cells to display abnormal morphologies, polarisation, proliferation, and drug responses, thereby limiting the ability to translate research findings from traditional cell culture into clinical practice.Recent advances in organ-on-a-chip technology enable …
- Study level
- Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Health
- School
- School of Biomedical Sciences
Improving platinum-based chemotherapy by targeting drug metabolism in lung cancer
Lung cancer is the deadliest cancer accounting for 18.4% of all cancer-related deaths. Platinum-based chemotherapy remains a key treatment option for most people living with this disease, either as adjuvant therapy or in combination with immunotherapy. However, resistance to therapy is a significant issue in the treatment of lung cancer. Novel therapeutic strategies combined with predictive biomarkers chemotherapy response are needed to transform the clinical management of NSCLC.Our published work has identified novel biomarkers and druggable proteins from deregulated protein …
- Study level
- Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Health
- School
- School of Biomedical Sciences
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Genomics and Personalised Health
Application of fluorescence-activated cell sorting and confocal microscopy for the study of the microbial communities responsible for nutrient removal from domestic wastewater
The removal of nutrients like carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus from wastewater is critical to the prevention of eutrophication in receiving water systems and is carried out by complex microbial communities.Eutrophication can have devastating consequences on aquatic life and natural ecosystems, with toxic algal blooms also posing a risk to human health.Understanding the microbiology of phosphorus (P) removal from wastewater is considered essential to knowledge-based optimisation of enhanced biological P removal (EBPR) systems.Most of the species in these systems are novel …
- Study level
- Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Health
- School
- School of Biomedical Sciences
- Research centre(s)
-
Centre for Microbiome Research
The impact of neuroretinal disease on circadian behavior and sleep
Chronic sleep disruption impacts on quality of life and can lead to cardiovascular disease and cancer (Cable et al, Ann N Y Acad Sci 2021). Importantly in people with underlying chronic health conditions, circadian disruption can exacerbate symptoms, disease severity and cause disease progression.Light signalled by photoreceptors in the retina is the most important cue for setting sleep/wake cycles. The impairment of this light signalling in eye and neurodegenerative disease leads to circadian and sleep disruption (Feigl & Zele, Optom …
- Study level
- Master of Philosophy
- Faculty
- Faculty of Health
- School
- School of Biomedical Sciences
- Research centre(s)
-
Centre for Vision and Eye Research
Prostate cancer transcriptomics (Honours and Master of Philosophy)
At the Australian Prostate Cancer Research Centre QLD, we are interested in the cellular adaptive response processes leading to therapy resistance in advanced prostate cancer.A focus area of our research is studying the transcriptome changes in prostate cancer cell lines, xenograft models and patient samples using RNA sequencing technologies.By integrating our large in-house repository of RNAseq data sets with publicly available studies, this project will further explore the cellular heterogeneity of prostate tumours and the plasticity of cancer cells in …
- Study level
- Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Health
- School
- School of Biomedical Sciences
Using machine learning to understand how the world’s microbiomes are changing due to climate
Shotgun metagenomic sequencing has become commonplace when studying microbial communities and their relationship with the health of our planet, and their direct effects on our own health. Currently, there are >180,000 shotgun metagenomes publicly available, but until recently trying to treat these data as a resource has been challenging due to its extreme size (>700 trillion base pairs).Recently we have developed a tool that can efficiently convert this base pair information into a straightforward assessment of which microorganisms are present …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Health
- School
- School of Biomedical Sciences
- Research centre(s)
-
Centre for Microbiome Research
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