Student topics

Urban foreshores are increasingly emerging as the first line of adaptation and defence against extreme weather events, including sea-level rise, flooding, and storm surges, while simultaneously becoming sites of urban intensification to accommodate growing populations. Under these pressures, foreshore water infrastructures can no longer afford to segregate habitation from infrastructure. This research reconceptualises foreshores as territories where water infrastructures and human and non-human habitation are intricately entangled in future urban conditions. It explores a new concept of habitable foreshore water …

Study level

PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours

Faculty

Faculty of Engineering

School

School of Architecture and Built Environment

Research centre(s)

QUT Resilience Centre

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

Communication is an enabling technology for underwater systems such as autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), sensor networks, and diver support equipment. These systems cannot use radio frequency (RF) links, because radio waves are heavily absorbed by water, and poor visibility rules out optical links. Only acoustic communication is suitable. The underwater acoustic channel is bandwidth-limited, slow, and degraded by multipath, Doppler, and noise, making underwater modems a demanding signal processing and embedded systems problem.Commercial underwater modems exist but are expensive and …

Study level

Honours

Faculty

Faculty of Engineering

School

School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics

Nature-based solutions (NBS) such as wetlands, green roofs, and bioswales, are critical for sustainable urban water management. However, their benefits (flood mitigation, water quality improvement, biodiversity support) are often siloed or under-optimised.This PhD project will pioneer adaptive, real-time control strategies for NBS to maximise their environmental, social, and economic co-benefits. The research integrates sensor data, predictive modeling, and smart control systems to dynamically adjust NBS operations in response to weather, pollution events, and community needs.This project merges cutting-edge technology with …

Study level

PhD

Faculty

Faculty of Engineering

School

School of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Illicit discharges into stormwater networks threaten waterways, but current detection methods are often inefficient. This project develops a smart sensor network to identify and locate pollution sources in real time. The PhD will focus on:optimal sensor placement: algorithms for location, type, and density selectionreal-time alarm systems: fast, reliable detection to trigger inspections or robotic trackingscalability: cost-effective strategies for city-wide deployment.

Study level

PhD

Faculty

Faculty of Engineering

School

School of Civil and Environmental Engineering