TD School’s higher degree research students and their research topics
Our current HDR students
Current HDR scholars and their research topics
Shaheen Ali – MTrans.Innov
The investigation of fatigue and resilience in school teachers in the workplace
Shaheen’s research is focused on creativity and innovation for future practice and management of teacher fatigue and burnout in the progressive COVID-19 environment and beyond. This project explores the current and future neurophysiological effects of fatigue and burnout on secondary school teachers in the public and private education sectors. The project aims to follow a transdisciplinary approach to assess and present the statistical and neurological data to bring to light the burden on teachers in a modern context.
Shaheen brings to the project 10 years of experience as a secondary Biology, Physics and STEM teacher and many years of experience as a teaching associate for the Faculty of Science School of Life Sciences at UTS and the Science and Health Advisor for the U@Uni academy program for UTS.
Lucy Allen – PhD
Expanding ways of knowing and being: Embodied pedagogies in transdisciplinary teaching and learning
Lucy is a PhD candidate and associate lecturer within TD School at UTS. As a TD educator, she is curious about innovative education approaches and experiments with holistic, embodied and transdisciplinary pedagogies to explore what a curriculum for being, not just knowing, might look like. With a background in theatre and performance, Lucy has a particular interest in how practices such as improvisation can support students to reflexively develop knowledge as well as the social and emotional capacities to engage in a complex and uncertain world. Engaging in participatory action research, Lucy works collaboratively with students, educators and creatives from across disciplines to identify opportunities and co-create exciting new learning models.
Nina Brankovic – PhD
Influence of the institutional governance level of HEIs on individual motivations of academics to start cooperation with industrial companies
Jake Brown – PhD
Urban streetscapes and greening, an island for passerine birds in an anthropogenic world
Julia Fernandez – PhD
How to create resilient utopias/organisations through innovation, diversity and intersectionality. A comparison among ecovillages, SMEs and corporations
Julia is a transdisciplinary practitioner and researcher who is passionate about bringing stories to life. She is currently doing a PhD on social-ecological resilience. She is particularly interested in the role that narratives can play in helping society transition to a more sustainable future and how these narratives are formed and evolve in different communities.
Julia is keen to explore how to tackle complex social problems in a way that diverse and multiple perspectives are integrated. After working for more than ten years in the infrastructure industry as a chemical engineer and innovation manager, she is now looking at applying the previously acquired skills to an entirely different field. Other topics that influence her angle of research include systems thinking, psychology, ecology, and philosophy.
Medisa Focic – PhD
Intellectual property policies and intellectual property management at European universities
Monica Nicole Holly – PhD
Moving from an extractive to regenerative economy starts at the micro and meso level
Loic Juillard – PhD
How human-wildlife relationships shape adaptation to climate change
Ajanie Kodagoda Bammanna Arachchige – PhD
Image-oriented fake news detection in social media using deep learning techniques
Gwen Klerks – Collaborative PhD UTS and Eindhoven University of Technology
Research into the design of hybrid platforms for local communities
Gwen's research focuses on social design in community contexts, and more specifically in community-driven city-making initiatives. These initiatives are emerging around the world as traditional approaches to solving local problems no longer seem to be sufficient. Engaging in the community context brings new roles for designers, which extend beyond creation of products or services.
Gwen explores the influence of the community context on design processes in community-driven city-making and aims to construct a framework that might help designers to shape their role and contribution in the complex and dynamic community context.
Nynke Kooistra – PhD
Wild Trauma: post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in kangaroos
Paulina Larocca – PhD
Methods to Improve the Effectiveness of the Instruction Deferring Judgement in Creative Problem Solving: A Practised-based Approach
Paulina’s research focuses on creative problem solving and is a practice-led PhD. She is investigating the concept of deferring judgement as part of the Creative Problem Solving process in divergence, which most people would recognise as the saying, "no idea is a bad idea" often heard in brainstorming. Her research takes an embodied approach to the concept, deferring judgement, and also investigates what happens when you move it to the start of the problem-solving process, including even questioning the idea of the problem, which is a judgement.
Paulina is using arts-based practices, including theatre, to help people open their thinking at the start of the creative process to realise more possibilities.
Watch Problems to possibilities: Deferring judgement in creative problem solving on YouTube.
Adeline Leroy Scherman – PhD
Moving from an extractive to regenerative economy starts at the micro and meso level
Annabelle Lewis – PhD
Behavioural change: integrating systems thinking and behavioural economics approaches in the context of corporate prosocial behaviour.
Claire Marshall – PhD
What is your/our story/future: countering dominant narratives and empowering people to create regenerative futures
Claire is a transdisciplinary practitioner whose work blends foresight and media creation. Her current research is focused on how we can design experiences that allow us to challenge embedded ways of thinking about the future and prototype transformative and regenerative futures.
Claire has a particular interest in how our brains think about the future and the ways in which creative practice can be used to navigate these cognitive stumbling blocks. To do this she draws on a ten-year career in the media industry as a television director, development executive and experience designer.
Claire’s project, the Museum of Futures, created in partnership with the City of Sydney is an award-winning exhibition series that presents speculative objects created by local artists alongside ‘future histories’ created with diverse communities.
Taylor Mcevoy – MTrans.Innov
Reframing the functional contributions of wild pigs in rewilding narratives.
Trisna Mulyati
TOWARDS FUTURE SMALL FARMS: RURAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND INNOVATION DIFFUSION IN INDONESIAN AGRITECH ECOSYSTEMS
Trisna started her full-time PhD in 2024 after working in an agricultural startup, international development, and a university based in Indonesia. She is passionate about the transdisciplinarity of entrepreneurship and technology impacting the agrifood value chain. Supervised by A/Prof. Martin Bliemel and Dr. Jarrod Ormiston, her research investigates the agricultural innovation systems in transforming rural development, especially amidst the growing startups bringing new technologies and new business models in rural areas. The research will focus on understanding enablers to wider market adoption for scaling up more useful technology-based solutions among smallholders who are often resource-constrained and difficult to reach.
The research is also partly funded by DFAT Australia-Indonesia Institute and will have a qualitative approach with multistakeholder partners and participants from startups, small farmers, agents, agri-company, NGO, university, and government. Read more here
Hafsah Saeed – PhD
Neurological, Public Health and Medical Implications of COVID and Long-Term COVID
Wissam Soubra – MTrans.Innov
Synergy of platelet-rich plasma and orthotics therapy in the knee pain management: Towards innovative and futuristic management of osteoarthritis
Margarita Steinhardt – PhD
Human–felid entanglements at the sites of conservation and wildlife ecotourism
Margarita’s research explores human-wildlife coexistence in shared multispecies landscapes, with a specific focus on the Felidae (the cats) family. Building on her passion for wild cats and drawing on insights from the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities, Margarita’s research explores the affective nature of human-felid relationships in the contexts of ecotourism and conservation.
Margarita’s first case study focuses on the interactions between Spanish naturalists and the charismatic Iberian lynx in the Southern Spain region of Andalusia. This work is driven by an interest in how nonhuman charisma shapes affective interspecies relationships between lay naturalists and the animals they are drawn to.
See Margarita's research article: Re-Thinking Felid–Human Entanglements through the Lenses of Compassionate Conservation and Multispecies Studies
Deepa Subhadrammal – PhD
Cultivating confidence in times of deep uncertainty: what can we learn from the impact of venture creation programs on entrepreneurial self-efficacy?
Deborah Sullivan – MTrans.Innov
Optimizing pelican health and wellbeing in a multi-stakeholder world
Bronwyn Tregenza – PhD
What factors affect critical and creative thinking In teacher planning and student performance In middle school digital technologies engineering programs?
Samuel Yu – PhD
Futures worth wanting
Sam’s is researching approaches for envisioning sustainable futures. This is driven by the need for design-led transitions towards desirable future states. His work is primarily focused on the designing of Experiential Futures as a way of interrogating possibilities, to arrive at what we could come to define as a ‘future worth wanting’. To Sam, designing is futuring. And to create truly sustainable change, this will involve embedding critical and ethical reflexivity into ways we understand and practice design contextually, relationally and temporally.
His previous research explored participatory futuring, speculative design and the role of product design within the emerging discourse. He developed a co-design workshop resulting in a series of diegetic artefacts, each representing an envisioned future. Participants were then invited to extend the futures thinking by iterating upon those futures to produce new insights and possibilities.
Mariana Zafeirakopoulos – PhD
Innovating intelligence practice for complex social problems
Intelligence analysis’s role is to inform decision-makers on evolving harm, probability and risk to community and how this might be mitigated. However, intelligence practice is hampered in its ability to effectively inform emerging and complex social problems (for example terrorism prevention). Current practice has had limited evolution since the post-Cold War era focusing on more linear problem-solving methods.
This research explores transdisciplinary and design approaches to innovating intelligence practice, with a focus on the ‘co-production of knowledge’. It explores how systems can work more inclusively, reflectively and be more integrated across disciplines (e.g. policy, law, investigations, intelligence analysis, community engagement etc.) to create new frameworks or ways of understanding (and informing) complex social problems. The methodology draws from qualitative research methods including participatory design with experts in the industry to imagine a new future of intelligence practice. This new practice termed ‘Systemic intelligence’ proposes a structurally enabled approach to facilitate this co-production of knowledge – one which designs, informs and helps shape the future of the complex social problem.
As a former public servant, Mariana is keen to explore innovative and integrated ways of co-producing intelligence in ways that help (not harm) community, breaking the norms of past practice.
Ahmad Zuhairi Bin Muzakir – PhD
Low carbon transport system dynamics modelling for Malaysia
The total final energy consumption by the transport sector in many parts of the world has far surpassed any other sector. In some OECD countries, this has increased and overtook the energy consumed by the industrial sector in 1988, whilst had risen in tandem with the building sector. It effectively overtook the building sector in 2014 and becomes the largest TFC contributor to date.
In Malaysia, the transport sector TFC overtook the industrial sector in 2008 and became the biggest user until now. This situation happens as a confluence of many factors that interact in a system. The drivers within the system include land use and urban design; economic situation; hard infrastructure and public transport system, among others. Zuhairi is conducting research on the transport and energy system for Malaysia in partnership with several federal government ministries and agencies, led by the Economic Planning Unit in the Prime Minister’s Department. The research will culminate in a System Dynamics model for transport and energy systems that may be adopted to optimise energy use, ensure energy security, and mitigate greenhouse gas emissions.
