Project & industry research scholarships

The Aboriginal History Archive Research Scholarship are granted to candidates with a strong understanding of the nature of community control to conduct independent and team-based research, which will contribute to the research project - Resetting the Record: Indigenous History, Truth and Justice - funded by the Paul Ramsay Foundation.

Led by Professor Gary Foley, the overarching aim of the project is to unearth Indigenous history, stories, alternative narratives and learnings from the past, to engage communities, present into the public debate, provide materials for curricula, and, most importantly, make submissions to the Yoo-rrook Justice Commission in Victoria.

Participation in this project provides a unique opportunity to contribute to impactful research in Indigenous history, truth and justice.

Eligibility: Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander applicants only for Doctor of Philosophy or Master of Research
For more information please contact: Dr Rochelle Lepper, Rochelle.Lepper@vu.edu.au 

Smart charging scheduling is a vital challenge as dynamic environment with traffic networks and various unexpected issues. This project aims to develop a differential evolution framework for intelligent charging scheduling. The framework consists of a comprehensive charging scheduling model with various road networks and factors. 

The project outcomes include a distributed evolutionary computation framework, differential evolution algorithms, and cooperative co-evolutionary strategies. The outcome results will be demonstrated by practical evaluations over public datasets and comparisons to related works. 

The project is beneficial to the nation in both theory of artificial intelligence techniques and applications of real transport systems.

Supervisors:Professor Hua Wang

Eligibility: Open to Australian or New Zealand citizens, Australian permanent residents, and international applicants 

Funded by: Australian Research Council Discovery Project

For more information: Please refer to the application guide or email Hua.Wang@vu.edu.au.

Despite the tremendous benefits and advantages of artificial intelligence (AI), its growing carbon footprint has emerged as a significant concern. 

This project aims to develop a distributed evolutionary computation framework to optimise AI's carbon footprint. The project's objectives include advancing knowledge in the areas of green AI, carbon footprints, and computational intelligence. Expected outcomes include precise measurement of AI's carbon emissions, distributed differential evolution algorithms, and cooperative coevolutionary strategies. 

This project benefits the nation by promoting sustainable AI technologies, protecting the environment, conserving energy resources, and advancing progress towards the net-zero goal.

Supervisors: Professor Hua Wang, Dr Yongfeng Ge, Dr Jiao Yin

Eligibility: Open to Australian or New Zealand citizens, Australian permanent residents or International applicants for PhD only

Funded by: Australian Research Council Linkage Project

For more information: Please refer to the application guide or email Hua.Wang@vu.edu.au 

Data sharing has become a driving force for many businesses in industrial sectors. This project aims to develop a privacy preserving network data publishing system that can preserve user privacy in a personalised way while maintaining maximal utility of the published data. 

To make accurate privacy preservation, this project will design novel learning models to derive accurate users’ correlation and their privacy intention, develop efficient privacy preserving algorithms to deal with static and dynamic network data sharing. 

The success of this project will benefit many industries and government agencies to reduce users’ privacy breaches, avoid illegal consequences of sharing data, and enhance these service providers’ service quality.

Supervisors:Professor Hua Wang, Associate Professor Jiaxin Li

Eligibility: Doctor of Philosophy only. Open to Australian or New Zealand citizens, Australian permanent residents and International applicants.

Funded by: Australian Research Council Linkage Project

Applications: Open until filled

For more information: Refer to the application guide or email Hua.Wang@vu.edu.au

Lactate has often been wrongly considered a ‘poison’ or dead-end metabolite causing fatigue. However, new findings are challenging how scientists think about lactate - leading to the hypothesis that lactate is an important metabolic signal that modifies transcription and stimulates mitochondrial biogenesis. This project aims to investigate the fundamental biological mechanisms by which lactate alters transcription in skeletal muscle cells and the effects of lactate on mitochondrial content, proteins, and respiratory function.

This scholarship will provide the opportunity for successful applicants to work with an international team of researchers from Australia and France in a high quality learning environment to support researcher development.

There are two positions available for this project

Supervisors:Professor David Bishop, Dr Nicholas Saner

Eligibility: Doctor of Philosophy only. Open to Australian or New Zealand citizens, Australian permanent residents, and International applicants

Funded by: Australian Research Council Discovery Grant

For more information: Refer to the application guide or email David.Bishop@vu.edu.au 

This project provides a unique opportunity to contribute to impactful scholarship on violence and social repair and participate in international networks. 

This interdisciplinary project focuses on the afterlives of political violence, colonial violence, and war, and the possibilities of social repair. It aims to explore themes including:

• the enduring impacts of large-scale deaths, disappearances, and displacements for human and more-than-human worlds
• how centring vernacular and Indigenous practices of resistance, memory, and care might generate new languages of social repair
• how this might become a resource for re-imagining peacebuilding, reconciliation and transitional justice frameworks grounded in western, liberal ways of knowing.

Proposals are invited from scholars with backgrounds including but not limited to:

• peace and conflict studies
• anthropology
• development studies
• memory studies
• socio-legal studies
• Indigenous studies
• critical psychology. 

We are especially interested in projects geographically focused on Asia and the Pacific, and settler-colonial Australia. 

Qualitive and ethnographic projects are particularly welcomed, especially those incorporating critical, decolonial, feminist, or First Nations theories and methods. 

Applications close: Friday 31 July
Supervisors:Associate Professor Lia Kent, Professor Christopher Sonn
Eligibility: Doctor of Philosophy only. Open to Australian or New Zealand citizens or Australian permanent residents 
Funded by:VU Vice Chancellor’s Research and Impact Fellowship
For more information: Refer to the application guide or email Associate Professor Lia Kent at lia.kent@vu.edu.au

Community sport-for-development programs face growing pressure to show they make a real difference. Most programs can only report how many people took part but not the lasting change they aim to create. 

This PhD looks at how community organisations can turn their Theory of Change (a map of how their work leads to specific outcomes) into a practical, trustworthy way of measuring impact that they can keep using over time. 

The Western Bulldogs Community Foundation, which reaches more than 5,000 people a year and has just mapped out its pathways to Healthy, Safe and Equal communities, is the real-world case study. Drawing on evaluation theory and proven measurement methods, and testing approaches like Social Return on Investment rather than taking them at face value, the project will co-design and trial a reporting framework that gives the Foundation stronger evidence to learn from and share with funders, government and communities. 

We're looking for applicants with an Honours or Masters research degree in a relevant field, such as:

• public health
• sport management
• social science
• evaluation
• non-profit management,

Applications close: Monday 31 August
Supervisors:Professor Camilla Brockett, Professor Ramon Spaaij 
Eligibility: Doctor of Philosophy only. Open to Australian or New Zealand citizens or Australian permanent residents 
Funded by: Victoria University, Western Bulldogs Community Foundation 
For more information: Refer to the application guide or email Professor Camilla Brockett at camilla.brockett@vu.edu.au.