Visiting  Scholars

Dr. Kush Bubbar and Dr Carwyn Frost are working to establish a Trans-Atlantic research collaboration between Queen's University Belfast and the University of New Brunswick on marine renewable energy research including wave, tidal and offshore wind. 

Dr Jane Clarke is working with Dr Wesley Flannery and Professor Geraint Ellis on research in the area of marine governance and environmental policy. This research will specifically focus on the role of marine spatial planning in facilitating climate change mitigation and adaptation, with consideration of the changing legislative and policy landscape.

Dr Sean Durbin is collaborating with Dr Tristan Sturm and Dr S. Jonathon O’Donnell on a joint research project tentatively titled, Beyond Apocalypse: Christian Zionism in the Contemporary World. The result will be a co-authored book. In it we will explore the themes of Israel, militarism, and reconfigurations of American evangelical identity over the last 50 years. We Will engage in questions related to evangelical politics as a lens into the broader intersections of religious nationalism, apocalypticism, and conspiracist politics in the twenty-first century. Bringing together religious studies, politics, and human geography, the project stages a critical intervention into the contemporary politics of the transnational Christian right, by building on the authors’ prior expertise.

Dr. Garrett is an archaeologist who joined the OS200 project team led by Drs. Keith Lilley (QUB) and Catherine Porter (ULimerick) in March 2022.  As a postdoctoral researcher, her main duties on the team include coordinating the digitization and preservation of Ordnance Survey records, database design and implementation, database integration into GIS, and metadata management.  She is also actively involved in the project outreach programs.  Outside of the project, Dr. Garrett maintains an active research agenda as the Assistant Director of the Dún Ailinne Archaeological Field School in Co. Kildare, Ireland.

Jenny Green is working with Dr Myra Lydon and Civil Engineering staff in the School of Natural and Built Environment, aiming to establish and embed the teaching of equality, diversity and inclusivity (EDI) for the undergraduate programme.  The purpose is to equip future engineers with knowledge of EDI principles and their importance in delivering infrastructure fairly and for all of society, as well as ensuring inclusive and successful workplaces and teams. 

The proposed research is focused on the development of low-cost remote sensing techniques using computer vision and drones for assessing the structural performance of bridges. In particular, the research will zone in on two areas, that is, (i) enhanced inspections using low-cost remote sensing techniques and

(ii) measurement of the physical response of a bridge to loading. This will entail evaluating and developing techniques that use drones for (i) automatic crack detection and (ii) bridge displacement measurements.

Knowledge of load-carrying capacity that can be obtained cheaper than existing methods is essential to maintain bridge safety, while information gained from the performance of structures and the materials they are made from can be used to update or create domestic design codes where they do not already exist. Laboratory and field tests will be undertaken to evaluate the developed techniques from this study.

The research collaboration with Dr Satish Kumar focuses on the geopolitics of post-colonial international collaboration in Indian civil servant training and education.  Our aim in this research is to elucidate political geographies of transnational knowledge production, circulation and governance as they relate to statecraft and state building in the years and decades following independence. 

Dr Li is working with Dr Plunkett to research how societies adapt to the changing climate of a hyper-arid Lop Nur region in Tarim Basin, a key region of central Asia, using lake sediments and archaeological remains.  The research aims to place these desert-oasis cultures within the context of dynamic landscape changes and alterations in natural resource availability, and will determine the causes of development and abandonment based on form of mutualism between human and climate environment.  

Professor McFarland was first appointed to QUB, by the Royal Academy of Engineering, in September 2015.  His appointment was in ‘managing ageing infrastructure and Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) in Civil Engineering’.  He is working with Professors Su Taylor and Gerard Hamill in the realm of SHM and in particular the monitoring of deteriorating structures.  He has previously supported an ‘Outstanding’ Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) with QUB, developing an asset management strategy by using condition and performance monitoring techniques for maintaining deteriorating assets.  He is currently supporting research into the use of dynamic monitoring to assess the structural capacity of structural timber in Historic Buildings.  He is also supporting an EPSRC funded programme looking at Revolutionising Operational Safety and Economy for High-value Infrastructure using Population-based SHM (ROSEHIPS).  Professor McFarland has been Chairman of the QUB Industrial Advisory Board since 2019.

Computational Assessment of Bottom-Fixed Offshore Wind Turbines in Nonlinear Ocean Wave Regimes
Two experimental and numerical models are developed in this study to analyse the two-phase flow due to the interaction of regular and irregular wave regimes with a bottom-fixed monopile. The developed three-dimensional numerical model takes advantage of an implicit finite volume solver of the Reynolds Average Navier- Stokes (RANS) equation to calculate the two-phase flow due to the presence of the solid structure in progressive waves using the volume of fluid method.

In her role as visiting scholar, Rachel will collaborate with Prof. Keith Lilley and colleagues in the PAST cluster in SNBE. The research will relate to GIS and landscape, and will take a comparative, North-South approach. The aim is to enhance public engagement and stakeholder connections with organisations such as the National Trust. 

Dr. Pratiksha Pandey is currently collaborating with Dr. V. Sivakumar at the School of Natural and Built Environment to Design and develop a composite barrier which can reduce the impact of climate change (i.e., flood and drought) on a proposed development of urban infrastructures. Due to changing climate conditions, the underlying soil layer (mostly clay) in urban spaces are very prone to both drying (due to hot and prolonged summer) and wetting (due to intense and prolonged rainfall) phases. The underlying soil material develop cracks on the surface during hot summer and later tend to swell during intense precipitation. Thereafter causing risk of infrastructural failure and economic loss. Thus, as a protection measure, a novel climate adaptive composite barrier needs to be developed on laboratory scale and later can be tested on field scale in such a way that the water holding capacity of the soil surface can be enhanced and vegetation growth can be supported simultaneously on the same soil layer. Likewise, the proposed technology would be used to protect shallow geo-infrastructure such as retaining walls.

Ron Reimer conducts research on spatial and temporal variations in the surface age of the post-industrial ocean and modeling the dispersion of radioactive carbon resulting from atmospheric atomic bomb testing in the 1960s.

Dr Mastin and I are visiting Prof Plunkett and installing software on the high-performance computer that calculates the atmospheric transport of volcanic ash during volcanic eruptions.  Prof Plunkett and/or a future graduate student will use the software to help identify the volcanoes and eruptive conditions that could have sent ash to Ireland or Greenland, where it has been found in bogs and ice cores.

Dr Brian G. Scott is a specialist in archaeometallurgy and the study of the transition from the Irish Later Bronze Age to the Iron age.  He will be working to integrate new evidence on the various processes of change with existing ideas, and to create a new synthesis to cover the enigmatic period c. 700-300BC.

My current research comparatively investigates the role of age and gender indicators in designing inclusive city centres in two different-scale case studies of Tehran and Belfast.  Within an integrated qualitative-quantitative approach, this study explores the design and planning strategies to achieve sociocultural sustainability and thus contributes to the physical, mental and spiritual attachments of city-dwellers to their city centres.

Dr Mike Simms is working with Dr Ruffell on evidence for climate change in the Late Triassic as part of their ongoing investigation of the Carnian Pluvial Episode, and with Prof Reimer on the timing and scale of Holocene sea level change on the east coast of Northern Ireland. 

I aim to study the performance of floating platforms for wind turbines using high fidelity numerical models, considering different hydrodynamic and anchor configurations. I will use a Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH)-based solver called DualSPHysics. The performance of mooring systems for tension-leg platforms will be evaluated starting from previous investigations carried out under the supervision of Prof. Madjid Karimirad [1], investigating various connections layouts to establish new design criteria for platform under harsh weather conditions. Together, we will try to study the hydrodynamic response of the well-known DeepCWind [2] platform design. Our work will benefit from the support of the NI-HPC super-computing center to deal with the computational effort required to run the SPH model.

Visiting Students