Student topics

Optimising the application rates of organic amendments in agricultural soils is one of the most promising and practical solutions to reduce nitrogen (N) losses into the environment while maintaining an economically-adequate crop production.Organic amendments alone often don't meet the crop's needs. Consequently, a supplementary application of N synthetic fertiliser is needed in conventional farming systems to meet perceived production needs.Accounting for the amount of plant-available N (PAN) released by organic amendments and combining this with N-fertiliser will:ensure N demands of …

Study level

PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours

Faculty

Faculty of Science

School

School of Biology and Environmental Science

Research centre(s)

Centre for Agriculture and the Bioeconomy

Sorting waste or recyclables is an important but unpleasant job, currently done by specialised machinery and humans for the hard bits.  What are the core challenges that could be done by "robots that see". This is a challenging problem in perception, dynamic path planning and control.

Study level

PhD

Faculty

Faculty of Engineering

School

School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics

Melanoma is the 4th most common cancer in Australia. The link between skin cancer and UV exposure is now well established. If a DNA damage induced by UV exposure is left unrepaired, the mutation generated in the genome can lead to cell death or cancer. It is thus highly important to understand of how a cell can repair DNA damage. The main pathway to repair UV DNA damaged is the nucleotide excision repair pathway (NER) (Kamileri I. et al, Trends …

Study level

Honours

Faculty

Faculty of Health

School

School of Biomedical Sciences

Many water quality issues are event-driven. The most informative signals often appear during short windows associated with storms, illicit discharges, first flush, or operational upsets. Capturing these windows is genuinely hard. Manual sampling is often too slow, especially overnight or during fast-changing events. Conventional autosamplers help, but they are large, power-hungry, and typically deployed only at major assets, leaving smaller drains, tributaries, pump stations, and pollution hotspots without coverage. Even when an event is captured, fixed-interval sampling fills bottles after …

Study level

PhD

Faculty

Faculty of Engineering

School

School of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Many of our most important waterbodies, including reservoirs, lakes, lagoons, wetlands, sedimentation basins, and constructed wetlands, are still monitored using sparse in-water sensors and periodic grab sampling. These methods are costly to maintain, hard to scale across many sites, and often miss spatially variable changes in water quality.Non-contact sensing offers a different approach. Cameras, spectral sensors, radar, thermal imaging, and other sensing modalities can observe water from outside it, reducing fouling, simplifying servicing, improving worker safety, and enabling broader spatial …

Study level

PhD

Faculty

Faculty of Engineering

School

School of Civil and Environmental Engineering

This project explores buildings, public/civic spaces, and landscapes as water infrastructure. Water is integral to human survival; hence, understanding buildings and urban spaces as habitable water infrastructure has the potential to mitigate the effects of the climate crisis, navigate too much water (floods), and too little water (drought), and offer new modes of occupation.With increasing rainfall intensities, floods, rising sea levels, and drought, the pervasive dichotomy between habitable spaces and water infrastructures can no longer hold. The two can't be …

Study level

PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours

Faculty

Faculty of Engineering

School

School of Architecture and Built Environment

Decreasing water quality is negativtly impacting coral reefs globally and is a threat that can be actively managed.

Study level

Master of Philosophy, Honours

Faculty

Faculty of Science

School

School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences

Research centre(s)

Centre for the Environment

This project explores buildings, public/civic spaces, and landscapes as water infrastructure. Water is integral to human survival; hence understanding buildings and urban spaces as habitable water infrastructure has the potential to mitigate the effects of the climate crisis and navigate too much water (floods) and too little water (drought) while offering different modes of occupation.With increasing rainfall intensities, floods, rising sea levels, and drought, the pervasive dichotomy between habitable spaces and water infrastructures can no longer hold. The two can't …

Study level

PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours

Faculty

Faculty of Engineering

School

School of Architecture and Built Environment

Nutrients such as ammonium and phosphate species are essential in agriculture. However, release of excessive amounts of nutrients to waterways may result in eutrophication which can lead to toxic algae blooms, killing of fish and destruction of the environment.Compounding this issue is the fact that phosphate rock sources are gradually being exhausted. Hence, finding a means to capture and reuse phosphate species from sources such as wastewater treatment plants is potentially attractive.Consequently, this project involves the development of new phosphate …

Study level

PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours

Faculty

Faculty of Engineering

School

School of Mechanical, Medical and Process Engineering

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

Ultimately, the proper development of a plant and its ability to adapt to its environment is the result of how plants’ genes are expressed and interact with each other. Hence, it is of extreme importance to understand the mechanisms used by plants to regulate gene expression.Modification of the expression pattern of a gene is particularly important in modern biology. By changing the expression levels of a gene, it is possible to learn about its function, increase the production of a …

Study level

PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours

Faculty

Faculty of Science

School

School of Biology and Environmental Science

Research centre(s)

Centre for Agriculture and the Bioeconomy

Immigrants start their own business either out of necessity or opportunity. They engage in all different types of business activities, ranging form the small business inside the ethnic enclaves to the multinational enterprises across the globe.We are interested in new insights you can bring from your own research, business or community background. Please pitch your idea to us for the opportunity to create new knowledge together.

Study level

PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours

Faculty

Faculty of Business and Law

School

School of Management

Research centre(s)

Centre for Future Enterprise
Australian Centre for Entrepreneurship Research