Bioinspired Chemistry & Materials Engineering
The interdisciplinary research aims to pioneer discoveries in basic materials science and measurement sciences to develop technologies for creating complex biomimetic acoustic structures and to develop biomimetic sensors such as miniaturised, low-energy, insect-inspired antennae. Biomimicry studies nature’s scientific principles and uses them as inspiration for designs or processes with the goal of solving human problems. Research areas include bioinspired molecular design, polymer chemistry, computational modelling, sound/vibration-responsive systems, antimicrobials, and biomedical systems.
Nature-Inspired Sensors & Devices
Within physical sciences, biologically-inspired technology in acoustics has been explored in many systems from insects to mammals. Miniaturised devices inspired by insects are potentially useful for distributed sensing, integrating a variety of sensors for acoustics, temperature, pathogens, etc. To date such state-of-the-art devices only approximately replicate the biological form rather than the complex structural and signal processing functionalities of insect systems, require a significant power supply, and are far less durable. In collaboration with the other themes the devices research will focus on developing new nature-inspired sensors integrating biomimetic structure and function and enabling low-energy distributed sensing.
Socially Intelligent Management of Built Environments
Management of Energy and Water Infrastructures in buildings and cities pose multiple conflicting and interconnected challenges. The use, communication and feedback of energy and water infrastructures has been extensively explored to accelerate behaviour change, manage demand, optimise and predict building(s) performance and support wider urban decarbonisation. However, the majority of technologies and systems developed to date have tended to overlook the complexity and uncertainty of infrastructure systems and citizens relationships, values and needs that underpin their use. This theme would develop a first of a kind intelligent multidimensional communication system for socially smart urban energy and water management drawing on visual-spatial intelligence related to energy and water use.
Future & Foresight
This research theme focusses on judgment and decision making in anticipating the future. The research will explore the quality of individual and group judgments about future technological change and the usefulness of structured approaches to improving judgment and decision making, such as Delphi and Scenario Planning. Research areas include experimental design and analysis, and behavioural decision making / judgment and decision making.
