Research projects

Many biological tissues and materials exhibit elaborate and beautiful structures and designs at microscopic scales that are visible in X-ray or electron microscopy or tomography studies. Many of these have functionality that has been refined through millions of years of evolution, leading to efficient and effective solutions. Biomimetics and biomimicry attempt to harness some of biology's features for material design solutions, including in 3D printing and other free-form fabrication methods. This project proposes to explore biological material structure in butterflies, beetles, crustaceans, corals, plants or other organisms through microscopy or tomography studies and to replicate the structural forms in 3D printing for material analysis. There is flexibility within this project as to the specific organism studied and as to choice of focus on microscopy, material design or biological function. .

Professional Experience placements are a core, mandatory component of Australian initial teacher education (ITE) (Le Cornu, 2015). These Work Integrated Learning (WIL) components provide pre-service teachers (PSTs) with authentic teaching experiences under experienced mentor teachers. The participation and engagement of mentor teachers in ITE is voluntary throughout Australia and relies heavily on their good will (Ledger et al., 2020), yet this involvement is fundamental to the outcomes associated with ITE (Le Cornu, 2016). This emphasises the need for coherent systems that operate between universities and WIL settings to cultivate quality placement experiences (Grossman, 2010). Various legislative and funding arrangements create ambiguity and complexity in relation to partnership (Ledger & Vidovich, 2018) and inhibit system-wide approaches to effectively and efficiently create aligned systems of practice and collaboration (Ure et al., 2017). These enduring challenges are currently being exacerbated by a rapidly changing workforce, in response to disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and resultant national teacher workforce shortage. Moreover, improving the quality of practical experience in teaching is a priority reform area within the Strong Beginnings: Report of the Teacher Education Expert Panel (Department of Education, 2023). This research project examines data produced within Australian universities in relation to the workforce of mentor teachers participating in WIL from 2017 to 2022 to develop enhanced understanding of emerging mentor teachers in order to develop targeted workforce strategies. 

Australian Initial Teacher Education (ITE) has a long history of significant and sustained monitoring, evaluation and critique. This has resulted in increased external accountability through national program accreditation and evaluation, including accountability measures to ensure program quality and graduates' capabilities. Murdoch University’s ITE courses are rigorously designed, accredited, delivered and evaluated within this accountability framework and its courses are contemporary and responsive to the expectations and requirements of industry, community and policy. The current context of teacher workforce shortages, increasing demands of teaching, and external pressures on teaching candidates has resulted in declining ITE enrolments and rapidly evolving pathways into teaching. This provides an opportunity for innovation in ITE course design. This project will align an aRMT candidate with a research team as they pilot an innovative approach to ITE. The candidate will undertake a systematic literature review of ITE, exploring the interconnected themes of school- and university-based ITE preparation, internship, pre-service and early career teacher attraction, retention and traction and the policy environment in which this work is situated. Working under a team of experienced educational researchers, this systematic review will underpin research activity and engagement throughout the pilot and potentially offer the successful candidate opportunities to engage in further research within a team of educational researchers within the School of Education. 

Elite private schools are defined as schools that charge high fees and enjoy high status and reputation. Elite private schooling may cause macro educational inequalities and inefficiencies when its footprint is too large and its linkages with high-status occupations and social status is too tightly coupled. Given its very large private school sector, the number and enrolment share of elite private schools is likely to be greater in Australia than in other English-speaking countries. The aim of this study is to test this hypothesis by mapping the footprint of elite private schooling in Australia compared to its “Five Eyes” partners, namely Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US. Using publicly available data, geographic information system software and a comparative case study design, the aim of this study is to examine the prevalence, geolocation and enrolment share of elite private schools in the major cities of the five countries. 

Cross-national analyses of educational equity and effectiveness
This study will use an innovative analytical approach, Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), to examine educational equity and effectiveness in five or more countries that participate in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Programme for International Student Assessment. Specific countries and topics can be chosen by the candidate in consultation with the supervisors. The list of potential topics is wide ranging; some examples are the causes of rural educational disadvantage; cross-national differences in student-wellbeing, sense of belonging or life satisfaction; and policies that reduce achievement gaps and educational inequalities.

Vocational education and training for the Australian government’s manufacturing agenda
The Australian government has prioritised the development of high valued-added manufacturing in the food and beverage, medical products, renewable energy, mineral processing, defence, and aeronautics sectors. A major challenge in developing Australia’s manufacturing capacity in these sectors is a shortage of skilled labour. Finding ways to develop Australia’s labour force is therefore essential for meeting its manufacturing priorities. One strategy for developing labour skills is through vocational secondary education and training. The aim of this study is to identify models from other countries that could provide insights for the Australian context. The findings of the study will lead to specific recommendations about how vocational secondary education and training can be leveraged to meet Australia’s skilled labour needs in high value-added manufacturing.

Is it better to have large workers or more of them?
Trade-offs of group size and worker size in ants Social animals must choose where to invest their limited resources to maximise group competitiveness. For ants, there is a proposed trade-off between investing in the inpidual size of workers and the size of the colony. This trade-off affects how and where ants can live. For example, previous work has suggested that invasive ants should invest less in inpidual size and more in producing large colonies. We are seeking interested students to help us investigate this trade-off, which is fundamental to the fitness and strategy of ant colonies, and the environmental and social factors that control it. Approaches could include conducting a comprehensive meta-analysis and/or review to determine whether such a trade-off is consistent across ant species, and categorising ants along the trade-off curve according to such features as invasiveness, pest potential, habitat, diet, and foraging strategy.

If interested, please contact Sam at Samuel.lymbery@murdoch.edu.au

Cognition and Warfare Humans aren’t the only animals that go to war.
The mechanisms of non-human warfare, however, remains an understudied and exciting area of research. This project will use ants, the ideal model system for such studies, this system to examine the link between success in group battles and a crucial element of animal behaviour: cognitive ability.

There will be opportunity for students to work flexibly with us to develop their own projects within this over-arching goal. Broadly, we envision assaying the cognitive abilities of inpidual ants, constructing experimental armies from relatively “smart” or “stupid” inpiduals, and staging laboratory battles between these armies. This work will provide valuable data on ant cognition, and generate insights into the relative success of ant species. Since ants are one of the world’s most important groups of animal pests, such information is always of practical importance as well as fundamentally advancing the study of non-human warfare.

Redesigning sea containers to mitigate incursion risk
Exotic pests, diseases and weeds can hitch a ride to Australia inside shipping containers. Sea containers are demonstrated vectors to many economically important quarantinable insects, including timber pests, agricultural pests, environmental pests, and nuisance pests. The Harry Butler Institute is working with the Department of Agriculture Forestry and Fisheries to identify hotspots within sea container for pest refuge and to redesign niches to reduce the risk of incursion into Australia. We are looking for students who are passionate about protecting Australia’s biopersity and agriculture industry to join this project. Students can work with us to arrive at targeted projects, and examples could include:

• Matching microclimate and habitat variables within shipping containers to preferences of pest species
• Investigating the role of diapause in resistance to control measures and how this may change management approaches
• Optimising lure placement for effectively detecting pest presence/absence"

The proposed research aims to examine factors behind employees violating cybersecurity policies. While existing cybersecurity behavioral studies focus primarily on organizational, environmental, and behavioral factors, a growing body of literature suggests individual differences such as personality traits as a strong predictor of cybersecurity violations. For instance, extroverted employees, due to their inherent risk-taking nature, might often bypass security guidelines. Given that 90% of cyberattacks originate from human actions, this project seeks to identify factors that contribute to cybersecurity violations using established human behavioral theories and incorporating individual factors such as personality traits. Based on the identified factors, the ultimate goal of the proposed project is to develop and test a theoretical using statistical techniques such as structural equation modeling, and a propose a machine learning model. A comparison between the two models and how well they predict cybersecurity violations key and the novelty of this research.

With the fast development of Next Generation Sequencing technologies, hundreds of crop accessions have been genetically profiled. The large volume of genomics data will be incorporated into phenotyping data and environment variables measured in large field trials across Australia to develop genotype to phenotype predictive models. Such models predict phenotypic traits as functions of genotypic and environmental inputs as well as their complicated interactions. The project will have access to thousands of high-density genetic markers and variations obtained by other methods, which will boost the reliability of the models that can predict phenotypes using multi-level genomics profiles. The project will also evaluate the prediction of gene sets that can give optimal barley yield and quality given a specific environmental condition. Using machine learning, new models will not only provide a framework for de novo breeding and precision agriculture, but give a new systems biology perspective in the context of crop genetics.

Improving crop grain yield and other important quality, including heat and drought tolerance, disease resistance, etc, rely on understanding the regulatory interaction between genotype and environment and identifying the genes controlling crop genotypes. This requires mapping the phenotypic performance of large number of genotypes under different environmental conditions. The fast development of Next-Generation Sequencing technology has enabled sequencing thousands of oat germplasms and made available large amounts of genomic resources, including the oat pan-genome. On the contrary, phenotyping remains a labour-intensive process and desperately needs a high-throughput approach. The project aims to develop a fast and automatic phenotyping method using deep learning-based image analysis. The project will develop skills in state-of-the-art deep learning methods and have access to more hundreds of Gigabytes of image data from > 900 oat varieties.

Butterflies – and moths, beetles and insects more generally – have evolved many creative ways of producing green coloration, with or without metallic or iridescent shimmer. Some use green pigmentation, but most appear green by developing diverse types of structural coloration or optical effects. These structures are often highly complex and can create polarization, iridescence and spectral effects. Why butterflies have evolved so many different solutions to producing green coloration remains unclear. In this project you will conduct a stocktake of the mechanisms for generating green coloration used by Australian butterflies, based on spectral analysis and electron microscopy or tomography. This knowledge will then be compared across the lepidopteran phylogeny and against important ecological variables to understand better the evolutionary drivers of green coloration strategies in butterflies. Depending on the student’s interests, the project can be extended to assess whether spectral properties of butterfly coloration can be used in automated species recognition based on deep learning approaches of hyperspectral images.

Tourette Syndrome (TS) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterised by involuntary, rapid, and stereotyped movements (motor tics) or vocalisations (phonic tics) that are present for at least 1 year. The severity of tics ranges from mild and non-impairing to severe and incapacitating, with 29% of patients exhibiting self-injurious behaviours such as head banging or self-hitting. As such, it is unsurprising that TS can have profound consequences on a person’s social life as well as educational and occupational opportunities. However, the exact mechanisms of TS are highly elusive and the understanding of the mechanisms underlying TS would pave the way for developing future interventions. Here, we investigate the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying TS, focusing on brain connectivity using neurophysiological techniques. 

1. The project will involve laboratory and data analysis
2. Project will involve data analysis

This project is part the Industrial Transformation and Training Centre 'Healing Country', which integrates Indigenous Knowledge with restoration science to provide local livelihood opportunities and to restore country. The successful candidate will work towards research and development of effective, scalable restoration technologies to deliver biodiverse, cost efficient restoration that will contribute to the Indigenous Restoration Economy. Funding will be provided for research.

Associate Professor Rachel Standish and others depending on aspect of biological diversity the candidate is interested to study.

Australia is the world's largest iron ore producer (29% of the global total). Most of this iron ore is developed in Western Australia, making up 99% of overall production, the bulk of which has been mined from deposits in the Hamersley province in the Pilbara of Western Australia. Central to the Pilbara lies the Fortescue Marsh, an extensive (10 x 100 km) ephemeral saltmarsh subject to extensive episodic inundation, once every 10 or more years. The Fortescue Marsh is a recognised Important Bird Area (IBA), supporting 187 bird species and up to 270,000 waterbirds when inundated. As part of Western Australia’s commitment to be carbon neutral by 2050, many Pilbara mining companies have announced their intention to move to wind and solar energy for their operations. While an important step towards reducing climate change, this shift to renewable energy could have biodiversity impacts that need to be considered as part of green energy planning and commissioning. Understanding which bird and bat species are likely to be using proposed sites is an important first step towards identifying potential risk. For example, nocturnally migrating birds (species that are on the wing for multiple days) are more exposed than diurnally migrating birds. Raptors, which fly looking down and have limited binocular overlap and poor visual acuity towards the top of their head (likely an adaption to avoid solar glare) are more vulnerable to turbine strike, with Accipitriformes making up the most common bird family impacted by turbine strike. Also, larger birds are more likely to be recovered after turbine strike, while those with slower flight speed are also more vulnerable to turbine strike. In a global meta-analysis of the traits correlated with wind turbine collision for 9,538 bird and 888 bat species, avian collision rate was affected by migratory strategy, dispersal distance and habitat associations, while bat collision rates were influenced by dispersal distance. This project will compile a list of all bird and bat species reported in published and available grey literature for a 10,000 km2 area centred around the Fortescue Marsh, and compile a traits database for these species to calculate (a) wing loading (the weight of the bird / surface area of the wing), and (b) aspect ratio (wing length /wing width). Missing data will be compiled through measurement of museum specimens. These data will then inform species-specific flight risk windows and provide input values to Collision Risk Models (aerodynamic ability, flight speed, altitude and directionality), which can then inform conservation management decisions.

Trish Fleming, Jill Shephard

Feral cats can be difficult to monitor and control due to neophobia and trap avoidance behaviour, resulting in low detection rates and variable success of control measures. We will test a novel, long-life (up to 1 year) lure system to increase camera trap success and reduce neophobic behaviour of cats. Using this lure, we will develop a monitoring system to record feral cat activity, comparing between three camera types and identifying individual cats from distinctive markings.

Trish Fleming, Melissa Thomas

The fungal pathogen crown rust (OCR) causes significant damage in Australian oat production. This project aims to identify new sources of enduring high value resistance to OCR, tools to accelerate the use of these resistances, and locally adapted OCR resistant oat germplasm for use in developing profitable oat varieties. It will lead to responsible stewardship of broadly effective OCR resistance in grazing/milling/hay oats, increasing grower profitability, reducing reliance on fungicides, and underpinning planned growth in our export oat market. The PhD project will focus on identification of the resistance genes and develop diagnostic DNA-based markers for high value resistance (R) genes to speed future discovery. This project is part of an ARC linkage project in collaboration with University of Sydney and DPIRD

Professor Chengdao Li (MU), Dr Manisha Shankar (DPIRD), Professor Rajeev Varshney (MU) and Professor Robert Park (USyd)

There are several known fungal and viral diseases that are a constant threat to lupin production across Australia, particularly in WA where over 85% of the world’s lupin crop is produced. Diseases such as Anthracnose, Phomopsis, Cucumber Mosaic Virus (CMV) and Sclerotinia have caused significant yield losses, severe toxicity to livestock, or impacted grain marketability in the past. Reliance on disease resistance of new lupin cultivars in the farming system has been critical to controlling these diseases and minimising their related impacts. However, ongoing reports of yield loss and livestock toxicity despite the availability of disease resistant varieties suggest that there is still considerable room for improvement in enhancing resistance against these pathogens in lupins. An analysis of existing phenotyping methods and genetic resources available to Australian lupin breeders and pre-breeders for the major lupin diseases has identified a range of gaps that need to be addressed to accelerate the development of varieties with improved resistance. The PhD project will focus on identification of disease resistance genes for Anthracnose, Phomopsis and Cucumber Mosaic Virus (CMV. This is part of the GRDC lupin disease resistance project in collaboration with DPIRD, Curtin University and Australian Grain Technology ltd.

Dr Gaofeng Zhou, Professor Chengdao Li, Adj Prof Darshan Sharma (DPIRD) and Dr Jeff Thomas (DPIRD)

Septoria blotch caused by Parastagonospora avenae is a significant oat disease especially in Western Australia where almost all oat crops have some level of Septoria infection. Average yield losses from Septoria in the high rainfall zone are approximately 15% and result in significant economic loss. The Septoria pathogen population is diverse, making breeding for durable resistance difficult and to date little work has been undertaken to identify and characterise genetic sources of resistance to Septoria blotch. The aims of this research are (i) to investigate variation in virulence of P. avenae isolates across regional sites of WA and (ii) to identify novel sources of resistance and provide breeders with the germplasm and tools to breed varieties with durable resistance to Septoria. The PhD position will be one of the above two project areas depending on the student's interest and background. This is part of large national project funded by the GRDC and Western Australia Oat Industry Partnership.

Professor Chengdao Li, Dr Manisha Shankar(DPIRD), Dr Tianhua He, Dr Yong Han (DPIRD)

This project would examine the history of police reform in WAPOL, looking particularly at the dynamics of how reform is proposed, contested and achieved by different groups (political elites, bureaucracy, police reformers and civil society).

How is the Western Australian government readying the regulatory landscape for this new industry? What players are entering the sector and what constraints/opportunities do they find? What kind of labour is necessary for this sector?

In recent year, state and federal governments appear to have shifted their approach and strategies towards the right to protest. There have been numerous changes to protest laws and the use of repressive strategies by the police have been amplified for certain kinds of protestors and causes. What is driving these changes and with what consequence for the future of contestation in Australia?

The aim of my research project is to conduct an ethical analysis of the principles of defensive harming by police inside well-ordered liberal democracies like Australia. I intend to answer the following research question: How do the special moral obligations of police affect their permissions and obligations to use force? My project is divided into three parts. Part one will describe the permissions of ordinary citizens to use force in self-defence. Part two will explore the permissions and obligations (if there are any) of ordinary citizens to use force in defence of others. Part three will describe the moral obligations which a person incurs when voluntarily undertaking the role of police officer, and describe if and how such obligations affect the role-occupant’s permissions and obligations to use defensive force.

Dr Anne Schwenkenbecher (Murdoch University), Dr Kathryn Trees (Murdoch University) and Dr Adam Henschke (University of Twente)

We invite you to participate in a research study exploring awareness and practices of allyship toward Aboriginal peoples among adults who work with Aboriginal youth. This study is being conducted by a research team of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal researchers, across research institutions around Australia, but primarily in Perth (Boorloo). Please see the project site for details. Seeking qualitative or quantitative social science researchers with an interest in racism studies in Australia and allyship. Students from all social science disciplines or psychology are encouraged to apply. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students also strongly encouraged to apply.

The focus of our laboratory is studying the consequences of rare genetic mutations on gene expression and exploring molecular therapies. This project will explore the best way to diagnose patients with rare diseases, study the functional consequences of mutations and develop personalised nucleic acid therapies.

Dr May Aung-Htut Dr Craig McIntosh Dr Jessica Cale

Our laboratory is one of the world leaders in the development of therapeutic antisense oligomers with three US Food and Drug Administration-approved drugs developed in our laboratory. This project will design and assess antisense oligomer therapies applicable to rare diseases, including Kleefstra syndrome and DYRK1A syndrome using patient-derived iPSC, neurons.

Dr May Aung-Htut Dr Craig McIntosh Dr Jessica Cale

Understanding the consequences of mutations in non-coding regions (5'UTR and 3'UTR) in human genes. The project aims to understand the significance of mutation in non-coding regions and will explore the function of mRNA isoforms with alternatives 5' and 3' untranslated regions. This basic understanding will provide us with a better understanding of the pathogenicity of various diseases.

Dr May Aung-Htut Dr Craig McIntosh Dr Jessica Cale

One limitation of antisense therapy is effectively delivering to target tissues/cells. This project will explore ways to improve the delivery of therapeutic antisense oligomers to various organs.

Dr May Aung-Htut Dr Craig McIntosh Dr Jessica Cale