Student topics

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

Perceptions of gender are not limited to people; they extend to objects, products, and environments through subtle interactions between form, language, and cultural context. The inclusion and arrangement of specific aesthetic attributes are a primary driver of perceived object gender, interacting with various factors, including cultural and personal individual identity. This creates an opportunity to reframe the question of “object gender” through a design research lens.This PhD project seeks to explore object gender through practice-based design research. It leverages user …

Study level

PhD

Faculty

Faculty of Creative Industries, Education and Social Justice

School

School of Design

Research centre(s)

QUT Design Lab
Design Lab

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

This project will explore how blind and visually impaired (VI) peer workers use digital platforms in their day to day practice, with the aim of identifying or co-designing a platform that is accessible, JAWS compatible and aligned with the requirements of industry partner Chapter1’s peer-led employment services.

Study level

Master of Philosophy

Faculty

Faculty of Science

School

School of Computer Science

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

Parkinson's disease is typically diagnosed after the onset of motor symptoms, when significant neurodegeneration has already occurred. Growing evidence suggests that immune dysregulation, particularly within the innate immune system, may arise in the prodromal and early stages of disease and contribute to disease initiation.This project will investigate whether individuals in the prodromal and early stages of Parkinson's disease exhibit distinct peripheral immune signatures, focusing on monocyte and macrophage polarisation and plasma cytokine profiles, with the aim of identifying early immune …

Study level

Master of Philosophy

Faculty

Faculty of Health

School

School of Biomedical Sciences

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

Despite substantial advances in science, the translation of research findings into commercial products and services remains limited and uneven. Many promising ideas stall in the “valley of death” between laboratory discovery and market adoption, resulting in under-realised economic and societal impact.This research topic examines how scientific knowledge can be more effectively transformed into entrepreneurial ventures and innovations that deliver tangible outcomes. Positioned at the intersection of entrepreneurship and innovation, the topic explores the organisational, institutional, and individual factors that enable …

Study level

PhD, Master of Philosophy

Faculty

Faculty of Business and Law

School

School of Management

Research centre(s)

Centre for Future Enterprise
Australian Centre for Entrepreneurship Research

More than 10M people worldwide suffer from Parkinson’s disease (PD). As a neurodegenerative disease it is difficult to manage with adult-onset and slow progression with both both motor (walking problems, slowed movements, tremors, etc) and non-motor (anxiety, depression, cognitive decline, etc) symptoms. Current treatments focus on symptoms and clinical assessments based on intermittent, subjective evaluations with a 20 minute visit to a neurologist every six months. This cannot capture the daily fluctuation of symptoms effectively. Non-motor symptoms remain under-assessed and …

Study level

PhD

Faculty

Faculty of Creative Industries, Education and Social Justice

School

School of Design

Research centre(s)

QUT Design Lab
Design Lab

This project aims to develop forecasting models that balance accuracy with stability, minimising unnecessary changes in predictions that can disrupt operational decisions.

Study level

PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours

Faculty

Faculty of Science

School

School of Mathematical Sciences

Research centre(s)

Centre for Data Science
Energy Transition Centre

This PhD project will focus on developing and evaluating multi-objective optimisation models that simultaneously optimise forecasting accuracy and operational decisions in complex systems.

Study level

PhD, Master of Philosophy

Faculty

Faculty of Science

School

School of Mathematical Sciences

Research centre(s)

Centre for Data Science

This research aims to transform how organisations improve business processes by integrating artificial intelligence with real-time data. Existing process redesign approaches are often static, retrospective, and reliant on manual analysis. While process mining is commonly used to extract insights from historical data, these methods rarely incorporate AI models to support continuous, real-time process adaptation. As a result, they fall short of enabling intelligent, self-adaptive process management.This research addresses these limitations by proposing an AI-assisted, self-adaptive framework that combines historical and …

Study level

PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours

Faculty

Faculty of Science

School

School of Information Systems