Project & industry research scholarships
Victoria University is dedicated to undertaking research that makes a significant positive impact to business and society.
Externally-funded research projects
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, [email protected]Join a nationally significant project at the edge of preventing catastrophic bushfires from powerlines. The "SWER Broken Conductor" project, supported by a major Australian Economic Accelerator (AEA) Innovate grant and industry partners, is developing innovative technology to detect and locate breakages in regional power lines before they can ignite fires. This is a critical safety issue, as demonstrated by the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires, where a broken power line led to devastating consequences.
Our team at Victoria University has developed an innovative system using a unique Power Line Carrier (PLC) communication framework that can identify a break within one second. We are now entering a crucial commercialisation phase, advancing our successful TRL 7 prototypes to a market-ready TRL 8 product.
This is a unique opportunity to contribute to a high-impact, interdisciplinary research and development project that bridges the gap between academic innovation and real-world industry application. You will work alongside researchers and industry practitioners, gaining experience in translating advanced technology into a commercial solution with the potential for global impact. Your work will directly contribute to enhancing infrastructure safety, protecting the environment, and building resilient regional communities.
Supervisors: Dr Douglas Gomes, Associate Professor Cagil Ozansoy
Eligibility: Open to Australian or New Zealand citizens or Australian permanent resident applicants for Research Masters courses only
For more information: refer to the Application Guide or email [email protected] or [email protected]
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 [email protected] .
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 [email protected]
This research project will investigate applications of player monitoring and performance data. The specific research question will be refined in collaboration with the successful candidate and club stakeholders.
The selected candidate will step directly into the club’s resourcing model, contributing meaningfully to real-world decision-making within the AFLW environment. This provides a rare opportunity to undertake rigorous academic research while playing an active role in applied performance implementation alongside coaching, strength and conditioning, medical, sport science, performance analysis, and emerging data science personnel.
Areas of interest may include (but are not limited to):
- athlete monitoring, availability and physical readiness profiling
- training load and recovery modelling
- integration of wearable technologies and sleep monitoring tools
- development of practical visualisation and reporting systems
- applied performance insights to support strength and conditioning, medical, and sport science teams.
You will be embedded within an elite AFL club performance environment; involved in direct collaborations with high-performance leadership and multidisciplinary staff. You will also get hands-on applied experience alongside formal academic supervision.
Supervisors: Dr Samuel McIntosh, Dr Alice Sweeting
Eligibility: Doctor of Philosophy only. Open to Australian or New Zealand citizens, and Australian permanent residents.
Applications close: Friday 20 March
For more information: Refer to the application guide or email [email protected]
This project aims to develop a distributed evolutionary computation-based framework to optimise data privacy and utility in distributed database systems. It intends to synchronously solve the conflicting challenges of privacy preservation and utility maintenance in multi-objective, dynamic, and multitasking scenarios.
Expected outcomes include a new computation framework as a service and freely available distributed computation models, evolutionary algorithms, and knowledge-transfer strategies.
Anticipated benefits include theoretical contributions to artificial intelligence, cyber security, distributed computation, and a service to eliminate data owners' privacy concerns while guaranteeing the value of data in further utilisation.
Eligibility: This scholarship is for Domestic and International Doctor of Philosophy applicants only
Funded by: Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (ARC DECRA)
For more information please contact: Dr Yongfeng Ge, [email protected]
Refer to the 2024 Guide to Applicants for further details:
This PhD project will focus on designing, implementing, and evaluating a secure interoperability framework between Ambulance Victoria’s (AV) dispatch and operational systems and the Emergency Department (ED) management platforms of partner hospitals. The goal is to enable real-time, two-way data exchange through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), creating a seamless, integrated information environment to support intelligent ambulance routing, hospital selection, and patient offload coordination.
The project will address current gaps in data visibility and coordination between pre-hospital and hospital care by integrating live ED loading, patient flow, and ramping status data into AV’s decision-support ecosystem. This will involve designing API-driven microservices, defining data exchange standards, and developing an ontology-based data harmonisation layer that aligns heterogeneous ED and AV data sources. The research will also explore federated and privacy-preserving data sharing techniques to ensure compliance with Victorian and national health data governance frameworks.
This PhD forms part of the collaborative project Optimising Emergency Healthcare: A Data-Driven Approach to Ambulance Ramping and ED Efficiency, jointly undertaken by Victoria University’s Centre of Excellence in Paramedicine and Ambulance Victoria, with support from participating hospitals (e.g., Western Health).
Supervisors: Dr Khandakar Ahmed, Dr Assefa Teshome
Eligibility: Doctor of Philosophy only. Open to Australian or New Zealand citizens, Australian permanent residents and International applicants.
Funded by: Centre for Excellence in Paramedicine and Ambulance Victoria
For more information: Refer to the application guide or email [email protected]
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.
Refer to the 2024 Guide to Applicants for further details.
This PhD project will focus on developing advanced machine learning and spatiotemporal models to forecast ambulance demand, understand the dynamics of ramping, and optimise resource allocation across metropolitan and regional Victoria. Using multi-year datasets from Ambulance Victoria and complementary data sources—including emergency department (ED) status, environmental conditions, demographic information, and traffic data—the candidate will identify temporal and spatial correlations affecting ambulance service performance.
In addition to forecasting call-out demand, the project will examine relationships between ramping duration, ED waiting times, time-of-day, and seasonal or monthly variations to uncover systemic bottlenecks and operational risk factors. The research will employ deep learning architectures, probabilistic graphical models, and spatiotemporal clustering techniques to model complex interdependencies and develop data-driven insights for real-time decision support.
This PhD forms part of the broader collaborative research initiative Optimising Emergency Healthcare: A Data-Driven Approach to Ambulance Ramping and ED Efficiency, jointly undertaken by Victoria University’s Centre of Excellence in Paramedicine and Ambulance Victoria, with ethics and data approvals in place.
Supervisors: Dr Khandakar Ahmed, Dr Assefa Teshome
Eligibility: Doctor of Philosophy only. Open to Australian or New Zealand citizens, Australian permanent residents and International applicants.
Funded by: Centre for Excellence in Paramedicine and Ambulance Victoria
For more information: Refer to the application guide or email [email protected]
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 [email protected]
Regular exercise is one of the few interventions that has been demonstrated to reduce all-cause dementia risk, but we still don’t understand the complex mechanisms by which it protects the brain.
Utilising a unique combination of cutting-edge neuroimaging (high-field magnetic resonance imaging) and molecular biology (small-RNA sequencing of extracellular vesicles) techniques, this project aims to better understand the neurobiological mechanisms of exercise neuroprotection.
The goal of this project is to uncover novel biomarkers of exercise-derived neuroprotection, with the goal of identifying and validating a blood-based surrogate marker of brain health. This will aid in the development of a rapid, low-cost, and accessible blood test to monitor the therapeutic effectiveness of exercise to improve brain health and reduce dementia risk.
Supervisors: Dr James Broatch, Professor Andy Hill
Eligibility: Doctor of Philosophy only. Open to Australian or New Zealand citizens, Australian permanent residents or international applicants.
Applications close: Friday 13 March
For more information: Refer to the application guide or email [email protected] .
Industry-supported scholarships
The Victoria University Industry Scholarship Partnering for Innovative Research Delivery (INSPIRED) program provides a new pathway for innovative training in applied research.
Through INSPIRED, we will work collaboratively with new and existing industry partners to:
- solve business challenges
- develop a culture of innovation
- build an industry-ready workforce for the future.
Student participants in the program will receive a tax-free co-funded stipend scholarship to support their living costs while undertaking the research, along with a Fee Off-set Scholarship with general leave provisions included.
Read more about the VU INSPIRED program
For more information, please contact [email protected] .
How to apply
Please read the application guide for each project and submit your expression of interest to the nominated academic.
Visit our apply for graduate research page and follow the steps outlined to submit your admission application.
For other scholarship opportunities, refer to our domestic research scholarships page or international research scholarships page.
