Student topics

The Earth is a dynamic evolving planet that has continually changed throughout its history. This change is recorded in the different rock types preserved in the continental crust and is paralleled by the evolution of life. Study of Archean granitic terranes (4.0-2.5 billion years ago) provides invaluable information on the early Earth when 50% of the present day volume of continental crust was generated. You will help work out how Earth's earliest crust formed through:potential field workpetrographygeochemical analysis.

Study level

PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours, Vacation research experience scheme

Faculty

Faculty of Science

School

School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences

CRISPR-Cas9 technology allows us to modify virtually any gene in any organism of interest. It has generated a lot of interest, both in the research community and the general population.One of the crucial components of CRISPR experiments is the design of the 'guide RNAs' that will control where modifications occur.We have developed a software pipeline, named Crackling, to identify safe and effective guide RNAs across entire genomes. We're now seeking to develop a visualisation to communicate the results produced by …

Study level

Honours, Vacation research experience scheme

Faculty

Faculty of Science

School

School of Computer Science

Research centre(s)

Centre for Data Science

An individual's health status is very important to personal well-being and plays a significant role at workplace, home, and school/university. We do not worry or think too much about our health value until we experience bad consequences. Individuals will make an excellent contribution to schools, industries, and workplace provided that they have a good quality of life. With the advances in wearable technology, we can leverage their utility to monitor and manage our health.Emerging smart devices have potential benefits for …

Study level

Vacation research experience scheme

Faculty

Faculty of Science

School

School of Computer Science

Delays in acting in collapsing ecosystems can be catastrophic. With every passing year, the chances that the ecosystem has progressed past some point of no return increases. Yet the research and development needed to develop a new technology can take a long time. Balance between these two dynamic processes is needed to determine the optimal length and effort for developing new technologies. This project will develop a method for finding the optimal schedule for developing technological readiness, social acceptability, a …

Study level

PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours, Vacation research experience scheme

Faculty

Faculty of Science

School

School of Mathematical Sciences

Research centre(s)

Centre for Data Science
Centre for the Environment

Networks have been extensively used to capture social interactions, by representing individuals as nodes and their relationships as edges.Such networks have been used to model the spread of epidemics. A few nodes are 'infected', and over time they gradually infect their neighbours on the network, who in turn infect their neighbours, etc. This type of model can then be used to simulate different intervention strategies aimed at containing outbreaks.However, an important limitation is the difficulty to visualise these networks when …

Study level

PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours, Vacation research experience scheme

Faculty

Faculty of Science

School

School of Computer Science

Research centre(s)

Centre for Data Science

When planning environmental management, data are only valuable if they lead to improved outcomes. As new monitoring technologies and approaches are developed, it is critical that they are used optimally to focus on the most important information gaps.Monitoring technologies should only be adopted if they can deliver improved management utility, and new data should be rapidly gathered in locations where early information could offer warning signals of future ecosystem change. Mathematical and statistical approaches to assessing the value of new …

Study level

Vacation research experience scheme

Faculty

Faculty of Science

School

School of Mathematical Sciences

Research centre(s)

Centre for Data Science
Centre for the Environment

Antarctic ecosystems are complex, and data is limited since it is expensive to collect. Species interact in food webs which can be modelled as mathematical networks. The relationships between species are not always known, or we might know they interact but not how strongly. Noisy (or imperfect) data can be used to model these species interactions to give more certainty about how the ecosystem works as a whole – although the worse the data is, the less information it contributes. …

Study level

Honours, Vacation research experience scheme

Faculty

Faculty of Science

School

School of Mathematical Sciences

Research centre(s)

Centre for Data Science
Centre for the Environment

Historically, satellites have used rather large resolutions (30mx30m). However, we are now seeing much better resolution (3mx3m). We would like to apply new techniques to these satellites.

Study level

Vacation research experience scheme

Faculty

Faculty of Science

School

School of Computer Science

The CRISPR-Cas9 technology allows the modification of virtually any gene in any organism of interest. It has generated a lot of interest, both in the research community and the general population.One of the crucial components of CRISPR experiments is the design of the 'guide RNAs' that will control where modifications occur. It is vital that the modification is made efficiently and at the desired location. This calls for bioinformatic approaches to design these guide RNAs.Our existing Python-based bioinformatic pipeline is …

Study level

Vacation research experience scheme

Faculty

Faculty of Science

School

School of Computer Science

Research centre(s)

Centre for Data Science

Modern Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) rely on machine learning for detecting and defending cyber-attacks in information technology (IT) networks. However, the introduction of such systems has introduced an additional attack dimension; the trained IDS models may also be subject to attacks.The act of deploying attacks towards machine learning based systems is known as Adversarial Machine Learning (AML) [1]. The aim is to exploit the weaknesses of the pretrained model which has “blind spots” between data points it has seen during …

Study level

Master of Philosophy, Honours, Vacation research experience scheme

Faculty

Faculty of Science

School

School of Computer Science

To conserve species in disturbed natural environments, we need to use mathematical models to predict the consequences of different interventions. Unfortunately, these models are based on partial information of complex systems, and the systems themselves are subject to substantial observational and process noise.We often use ordinary differential equations to describe ecosystems, like the classic logistic growth model:dn/dt = r n (1 - n / k)However, these models are deterministic, and they assume we know the values of the key parameters …

Study level

Master of Philosophy, Honours, Vacation research experience scheme

Faculty

Faculty of Science

School

School of Mathematical Sciences

Research centre(s)

Centre for Data Science
Centre for the Environment

The project will investigate the potential use of a range of composite products made of gypsum plasterboard, steel sheeting and insulation foams to improve the fire resistance of light steel wall and floor systems. It will involve investigating the potential composite products’ suitability, conducting fire tests of small scale wall/floor assemblies (1.2mx.1.2m) made of such composite products to understand how they behave in fire and determine their fire resistance levels. Civil and Mechanical Engineering students with interest in structural and …

Study level

Master of Philosophy, Honours, Vacation research experience scheme

Faculty

Faculty of Engineering

School

School of Civil and Environmental Engineering