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 285 matching student topics
Displaying 97–108 of 285 results
Atmospheric cooling and shading for the Great Barrier Reef
This research sits within the Cooling and Shading Subprogram of the Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program (RRAP).RRAP is an ambitious and innovative R&D effort that places Australia as the leader of coral reef adaptation and restoration science. It is a consortium of Partners, including QUT, dedicated to creating an innovative toolkit of interventions to help the Reef resist, adapt to, and recover from the impacts of climate change. These partners include the Australian Institute of Marine Science, CSIRO, the Great …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
- Research centre(s)
-
Centre for the Environment
The pulse of sustainability: Interventions to sustainably increase legume production and consumption
Legume-supported value chains, from production to consumption, provide benefits to people and nature that include improved ecosystem functions and resource use efficiency, as well as farmed animal and human health provisions. Environmental co-benefits of legumes include reduced nitrate leaching, increased food sources for pollinators, a greater structural diversity of farmland, and improved soil fertility. Despite the potential of legumes to improve the sustainability of cropping systems and enhance human health, the production and consumption of legumes in Australia is low.Multiple …
- Study level
- Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Biology and Environmental Science
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Agriculture and the Bioeconomy
Interactive (and collaborative) robot programming using language (Project 2.5 - Joint CSIRO/ACC)
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
- School
- School of Design
- Research centre(s)
-
Design Lab
Comprehensive strain-level characterisation of microbial communities associated with inflammatory bowel disease
Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) is a chronic, relapsing inflammatory disorder driven by complex interactions between environmental, microbial and immune-mediated factors 1,2. An unfavourable shift in gut microbiome composition, known as dysbiosis, is now considered a key feature of IBD 2-5, however it is unclear how specific microorganisms and their interactions with host cells contribute to disease onset and progression.Previous IBD studies have been largely limited to older sequencing methods with low phylogenetic and functional resolution. Furthermore, these studies have predominantly …
- Study level
- Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Health
- School
- School of Biomedical Sciences
- Research centre(s)
-
Centre for Microbiome Research
Model predictive control of connected vehicle platoons
Control of connected vehicle platoons can ensure the swift movement of traffic through a city by sharing vehicles' states and desired actuation. This networked control design can alleviate traffic jams, reduce vehicle emissions, and reduce fuel usage through improved aerodynamics. Model Predictive Control algorithms are a natural solution to address constraints arising from both communications and system dynamics. A key challenge is to design distributed control algorithms that are robust to disturbances in the environment and to stochastic information from …
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics
Early prevention of inflammation-related diseases: characterization and use of milk and infant formula
Our belief in the importance of the 'first thousand days' and the critical part that nutrition plays has led my group to studies evaluating the composition and actions of milk and infant formula.Our studies of exosomes in biological fluids have led us to consider their presence and potential roles in milk and thus nutrition. To date, we have mainly determined proteomic contents (cargo) of exosomes but have been increasingly swayed by the literature suggesting important roles for microRNAs in general …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Health
- School
- School of Biomedical Sciences
Machine learning for understanding and predicting behaviour
Understanding behaviour and predicting events is a core machine learning task, and has many applications in areas including computer vision (to detect or prediction actions in video) and signal processing (to detect events in medical signals).While a large body of research exists exploring these tasks, a number of common challenges persist including:capturing variations in how behaviours or events appear across different subjects, such that predictions can be accurately made for previously unseen subjectsmodelling and incorporating long-term relationships, such as previously …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics
How does executive compensation influence voluntary turnover?
Corporate remuneration schemes can attract, retain, and motivate executives to exert effort and align their interests with shareholders’ interests. Prior studies find that executives are likely to resign when they are paid less than their peers, leading to a high rate of managerial turnover. However, paying excess compensation reduces firm value and it’s commonly related to firm underperformance. On the other hand, replacing top executives can be extremely costly for firms. Therefore, it’s very important to understand the reasons behind …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy
- Faculty
- Faculty of Business and Law
- School
- School of Accountancy
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
Therapeutic opportunities targeting epigenetic-metabolism crosswalks in cancer
Epigenetic and metabolic pathways in cancer cells are highly interconnected. Epigenetic landscape in cancer cells is modified by oncogene-driven metabolic changes. Metabolites modulate the activities of epigenetic modifying enzymes to regulate the expression of specific genes. Conversely, epigenetic deregulation that occurs in cancer affect the expression of metabolic genes, thereby altering the metabolome. These changes all coordinately enhance cancer cell proliferation, metastasis and therapy resistance.The overall aim of the project is to understand the link between the activity of epigenetic …
- Study level
- Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Health
- School
- School of Biomedical Sciences
Epigenetic regulation of non-coding RNAs in hypoxic tumours
In solid tumours, hypoxia occurs as a result of limitation on oxygen diffusion in avascular primary tumours or their metastases. Persistent hypoxia, significantly reduces the efficacy of radiation and chemotherapy and lead to poor outcomes. This is mainly due to increase in pro-survival genes that suppress apoptosis, enhance tumour angiogenesis, the epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition, invasiveness and metastasis. Much of tumour hypoxia research has been centred on examining the transcriptional targets of hypoxia inducible factors (HIFs).HypothesisEpigenetic changes mediate the effect of hypoxia …
- Study level
- Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Health
- School
- School of Biomedical Sciences
Potential for defective interfering particles (DIPS) to interrupt mammal-mosquito transmission of dengue virus
Dengue is a major mosquito-borne disease affecting 390 million people annually across 100 countries. Disease results from infection with dengue viruses, which are single positive-stranded RNA viruses in the family Flaviviridae. Defective interfering particles (DIPs) are virus-like particles with greatly reduced genomes that are byproducts of RNA virus replication and replicate only in the presence of standard virus (Vignuzzi and Lopez 2019, doi: 10.1038/s41564-019-0465-y). DIPs occur naturally during Dengue infection (Li et al. 2011, doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0019447) and suppress DENV replication …
- Study level
- Master of Philosophy
- Faculty
- Faculty of Health
- School
- School of Biomedical Sciences
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