Open Access Theses

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Access status: Embargo ,
The Kamapuk Fauna: A late Holocene vertebrate faunal sequence from the Western Highlands District, Papua New Guinea with implications for palaeoecology and archaeology
(1981) Aplin, Ken
Access status: Open Access ,
Deciphering the Musical Language of Nicolas Obouhow
(2017) Atri, Azadeh
Various styles and techniques of composition were experimented with and developed by avant-garde composers during the first decades of the 20th century. Nicolas Obouhow (1892-1954) plays a significant role as a composer who experimented, very early, with a 12-tone system and electronic sounds. His innovative ideas were not only a response to the Russian avant-garde movement, but were also part of the wider international quest for new means and techniques of composition. For Obouhow, art was a means to facilitate his mystical search, and his views on music place him in a broader international cultural context associated with the occult and a belief in the transcendental power of sound. Drawing from a wide range of primary sources, in particular the Obouhow Archive at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, and contemporary newspapers and journals, I will firstly demonstrate how Obouhow's idiosyncratic ideas were formed and influenced by his spiritual beliefs and significant historical events such as the Russian Revolution and the First World War. Secondly, through examining his circle and important relationships, I will discuss how Obouhow's views were also in accord with the esoteric beliefs held by many others and how these views were part of a broader worldwide search for man's spiritual destiny. Finally, through detailed analysis of form, harmonic language, synthetic scale systems and orchestration, I will show how Obouhow contributed to the early decades of modernism and 12-tone writing.
Access status: Open Access ,
The population of Victoria, 1851 to 1901 : an appraisal of the statistical sources, together with some analysis of the growth of the population of the colony
(1960) Packer, D. R. G.
The thesis is concerned with the colony of Victoria taken as a whole. The first section of the thesis is concerned with investigating the nature, and examining the trustworthiness and usefulness, of the chief statistical sources relevant to the study of the Victorian population during the second half of the nineteenth century - the censuses, the vital statistics, and the migration statistics. We attempt to show that the censuses are the most reliable of these sources, and that therefore considerable use would have to be made of them even when it might be theoretically more desirable to use other sources. We suggest that the vital statistics become increasingly reliable as the century advances. We argue that the migration statistics are an untrustworthy and indeed dangerous·source. In the course of this, we try to make a contribution towards the history of Australian population statistics. In the second section we begin with a broad survey of the overall growth of population between 1851 and 1901. This serves to "define the problem": to indicate what it is, the contributing factors to which must be detected and described. We then proceed to a discussion of the role played by migration in bringing about demographic change. Here we begin by arguing that the migration statistics themselves cannot, at least in the beginning, help us in this discussion; and so we attempt, through use of the censuses and vital statistics, to establish approximate figures of net migration in each intercensal period. On the basis of these figures we enter into a consideration of the contribution of migration to intercensal population growth. We then call into question the usefulness of the concept of "net migration", and thereafter approach the whole problem in another way: by investigating what can be discovered and said about the numbers and characteristics of persons added to the population, by dint of migration, within intercensal periods. From that point, by and large, we are confined to indicating what we would have done had time and circumstances permitted.
Access status: Open Access ,
The press in Indonesia as exemplified in reactions to controversies on the basis of the state
(1968) Matthews, Philip D.
Access status: Open Access ,
Arbovirus replication in vertebrate cells : a comparative study
(1972) Dennett, Donald Paul
The investigations described in this thesis compare certain properties of two group A (Ross River virus and Semliki Forest virus) and one group B arbovirus (Kunjin virus). Chapter I examines aspects of the growth of these viruses in vertebrate cell culture. Plaque development, the effects of adsorption temperature on virus titre and the characteristics of single-cycle growth of these viruses are reported. Attempts were made to measure the kinetics of virus development, to determine virus yields, and to examine the relation between cytopathic effect and single-cycle growth. In Chapter II experiments to further characterize RNA replication in group A and group B arbovirus-infected cells are described. The time course and levels of RNA synthesis are compared in cells infected by these viruses. RNA species made during replication of Semliki Forest and Ross River viruses are compared and partially characterized by electrophoresis on agarose gels.
Access status: Open Access ,
Solar thermal energy conversion in high-temperature hierarchical solar absorbers
(2026) Guo, Yifan
Solar absorber coatings for high-temperature concentrated solar thermal (CST) systems are crucial for efficient solar-thermal energy conversion. This research focuses on hierarchical coatings, investigating light-matter interactions across nano-, micro-, and macro-length scales to understand how surface morphology and material properties influence energy conversion. It also evaluates the accuracy of Monte Carlo ray tracing (MCRT) and finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) modelling methods for multi-length scale structures, identifying the most suitable approach for various applications. Finally, experimental characterisation assesses the optical performance and durability of coatings under dynamic ageing, providing insights into their long-term stability and optimisation for CST systems. A comparison of MCRT and FDTD methods demonstrates their applicability to modelling light-matter interactions in hierarchical solar absorber coatings. MCRT effectively simulates macro-scale morphologies with characteristic lengths exceeding 20 micro meters, while FDTD captures detailed wavelength-dependent behaviour at nano- and micro-scales. These results highlight the importance of aligning modelling techniques with specific length scales to achieve accurate predictions of radiative properties. At the nano-scale, a scalable nanolayer architecture comprising monodispersed nanospheres embedded in a binding matrix demonstrates remarkable solar absorptance of up to 97.64% and excellent stability after 1000h of ageing at 900C. Both theoretical and experimental results confirm that this nanolayer enhances absorptance by more than 40%, even under extreme conditions. At the micro-scale, simulations show that deeper micropores with smaller diameters and moderate to high surface coverage significantly improve light-trapping effectiveness, achieving over 70% effectiveness on arbitrary materials. At the macro-scale, surface coverage emerges as the dominant factor in enhancing absorptance, with macro-scale protrusions delivering improvements in light trapping, regardless of configuration or diameter. Additionally, the development of a titania-based coral-structured coating highlights excellent optical performance and durability under high-temperature conditions. This coating effectively inhibits titanium cation diffusion, ensuring long-term stability and maintaining high solar absorptance even after extended ageing. By evaluating changes in optical properties before and after ageing, this study provides key insights into the time-dependent durability of hierarchical solar absorbers, offering a reliable and scalable solution for CST applications.
Access status: Open Access ,
The Gift: an archaeologist re-imagines the deep past
Paton, Robert
This thesis is a reflection on Australian Indigenous peoples' engagement with science-based archaeology from the perspective of an archaeologist who has worked alongside Aboriginal people for four decades. It asks two main research questions: why Indigenous views of the past are marginalised? and, what Indigenous knowledge might look like in interpretations of Australia's deep past that is dominated by archaeologists? To answer these questions the first part of the thesis involves an examination of the historic context of Indigenous involvement in the discipline of archaeology, acknowledging significant shortcomings. The second part provides two detailed case studies working alongside Indigenous people: one with the Mudburra and Jingili people from the Northern Territory, the other with the Western Wakka Wakka community from southeast Queensland. The research demonstrates that both Indigenous groups have highly sophisticated views of their deep histories. Their views are tied closely to objects that they regard as carrying parts of their histories. A close examination of these world views, through studies of some important objects, shows that their histories have signatures that can be recognised in the archaeological record. Both groups confidently feel that their Indigenous histories reflect their pasts and who they are as people. However, they would like to expand their knowledge by working alongside archaeologists and other scholars such as historians. The final part of the thesis examines the shape of such a collaboration.
Access status: Open Access ,
Th role of service providers in helping women's access to justice in domestic violence cases in Bangladesh and Papua New Guinea
(2026) Banarjee, Subrata
This research investigates service providers' perspectives on women's access to justice in Bangladesh and Papua New Guinea in light of recent legal and policy reforms and assesses the impact of these reforms. It also examines how multiple intersectional factors such as gender, class, culture, and religion affect service provision and women's access to justice. A conceptual framework is developed that incorporates accessibility, legal protection, victim empowerment, and outcomes. It shows how feminism and human rights movements have significantly informed legal and institutional reforms in both nations, and argues that the concepts of vernacularisation and intersectionality help to illustrate the differences, challenges, and adaptations encountered during implementation in both countries. Qualitative research was conducted over six months in Bangladesh and one month in Papua New Guinea, investigating the roles of courts, police, village courts, and victim support services through observations and interviews. While primarily focused on Bangladesh, the same themes are explored in Papua New Guinea on the basis of a much shorter period of fieldwork. The findings reveal some improvements in each country in respect of the provision of specialised services for women in accessing courts and police, reporting pathways, legal assistance, victim protection and their representation in the criminal justice process. However, there remains considerable evidence of continuing bias in how victims are treated by police and in specialised courts in both contexts, depending on their socio-economic status, education, class, geography, and other intersectional characteristics. While support service organisations, assist victims in receiving legal aid, medical care, and navigating formal justice services in a more gender-sensitive and structured manner; they are seriously constrained by inadequate resources. The study confirms that women's access to service providers in rural areas is particularly limited, with services largely concentrated in major urban centres. Justice practices in rural villages continue to be mediated through cultural and religious norms and practices, local power dynamics, and deeply embedded patriarchal structures. This research contributes to our understanding the role of service providers for victims of domestic violence in Bangladesh and Papua New Guinea and highlights the need for integrating intersectional and victim-centred approaches in service delivery to improve women's access to justice.
Access status: Open Access ,
Alternative Solid Propellants for Electrothermal Plasma Thrusters
(2026) Lee, Thimthana
Nanosatellites, particularly CubeSats, have transformed the space industry with their low-cost and compact form factor. Their operational lifetime in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) is, nevertheless, quite limited by nature because of orbital decay through atmospheric drag, and onboard propulsion is therefore obligatory for advanced missions. For power and mass-constrained CubeSats, electrothermal radio-frequency (RF) plasma thrusters offer a promising solution as they use low power to rapidly heat a propellant and enhance thrust. While the development of such thrusters has evolved through strategies like optimising discharge geometries and coupling modes, experimental work has remained focused on traditional gaseous propellants like argon or xenon that require heavy and high-pressure storage tanks. The objective of this thesis is therefore to explore solid-state propellants as a viable alternative for the small-scale electrothermal thruster. While some solid options like iodine are corrosive and buckminsterfullerene are expensive, this work focuses on five storable, non-corrosive, and abundant solid hydrocarbons: naphthalene, adamantane, camphor, borneol, and hexamine. The initial phase of this research involved a detailed cold-gas characterisation of these candidates. The results confirmed that their mass flow rates are exponentially dependent on temperature and can be controlled with only a few watts of heating power (with the exception of hexamine). Although the cold-gas thrust from the solid propellants was lower than that of argon, the analysis revealed their better effective specific impulse and delta-v performance, which accounts for the significant mass savings from eliminating high-pressure tanks. Based on these cold-gas comparisons, camphor and naphthalene were identified as promising candidates in terms of their power efficiency and thrust generation. The thesis then proceeds to the measurement of plasma performance, where additional RF power is used to heat the propellant flow. The results revealed a substantial additional thrust gain for the solid propellants, significantly greater than that observed for a monoatomic gas such as argon. This enhancement resulted in a comparable total thrust of up to 1.1 mN at a 3 mg/s flow rate with 45 W of RF power, compared to a cold-gas thrust of only 0.6 mN under the same flow conditions. While the plasma thrust in argon is well-understood to be enhanced by ion-neutral charge exchange (I-N CEX) collisions, the large thrust enhancement in the hydrocarbons case is attributed to exothermic reactions resulting from their molecular dissociation, which leads to a greater kinetic energy release into the bulk gas. These experimental findings were supported by analytical estimations and relevant external literature focused on the dissociation of these specific hydrocarbons. Finally, this work continues to develop a non-invasive diagnostic technique using Optical Emission Spectroscopy (OES) to further investigate plasma physics, specifically the neutral gas temperature, using adamantane as a case study. By analysing the rovibrational spectra of the N2 Second Positive System (as a tracer gas) and the intrinsic C2 Swan band, the neutral gas temperature was determined. The results demonstrate that by adding a trace amount of N2, the gas temperature of an adamantane plasma can be reliably estimated and is observed to increase quasi-linearly with RF power. As the C2 band was not readily measurable in a pure adamantane plasma, helium was introduced as a buffer gas to mimic plasma processing conditions. The resulting gas temperature was found to be in agreement with the temperature obtained from the N2 tracer method. These temperature results were then used to predict the thrust performance of the electrothermal plasma thruster, and the predictions were found to be in good agreement with the direct thrust measurements.
Access status: Open Access ,
Advancing Graph Neural Networks: Expressivity Enhancement, Information Flow Optimization, and Dynamic Process Modelling
(2026) Hevapathige, Asela
Graph Neural Networks have emerged as powerful tools for learning representations from graph structured data, yet fundamental limitations constrain their effectiveness across diverse applications. This thesis addresses three critical challenges in graph representation learning: improving structural expressivity, optimizing information propagation, and modeling dynamic processes. First, we address the expressivity limitations of standard message passing neural networks, which are bounded by the 1 Weisfeiler Lehman test. Using permutation invariant graph partitioning, we develop Graph Partitioning Neural Networks that capture complex structural interactions by explicitly modeling how different graph components interact. Our theoretical analysis demonstrates that this approach efficiently approaches 3 WL expressivity while remaining computationally tractable. Next, we develop two complementary frameworks for adaptive depth allocation in GNNs. The first uses learnable Bakry Emery curvature to capture both structural properties and diffusion dynamics, showing that nodes with higher curvature require fewer message passing iterations for effective representation learning. The second provides theoretical foundations linking neighborhood characteristics to optimal aggregation strategies under different homophily conditions, revealing that aggregation requirements depend on the balance between same label neighbors, opposite label neighbors, and local degree distribution. Both frameworks remove the need for separate architectures for homophilic and heterophilic graphs. We then address limitations of existing diffusion based GNNs through two new frameworks. The Generalized Opinion Dynamics Neural Framework unifies multiple opinion dynamics models, incorporating node specific stubbornness, dynamic neighborhood influence, and structural regularization to enable diverse convergence behaviors including single consensus, multi consensus, and individualized consensus. For influence maximization, we develop Deep Sheaf Networks that model propagation as a sheaf diffusion reaction process, introducing pointwise and coupled dynamics operators to capture both intrinsic node updates and neighborhood interactions across progressive and non progressive diffusion models. A subgraph based optimization method reduces the combinatorial search space while accounting for overlapping influence among nodes. In summary, the theoretical contributions of this thesis provide rigorous foundations for understanding structural interactions, information flow optimization, and dynamic process modeling in graph neural networks. Extensive experiments across node classification, graph classification, graph regression, influence estimation, and influence maximization tasks show that our approaches consistently outperform existing methods.
Access status: Open Access ,
SHIELD: A SHapley and Information-theory based framework for Equitable Learning via Dissimilar feature grouping
(2025) Yun, Hyeonggeun
Machine learning models are increasingly applied in clinical and biomedical settings, due to their ability to capture an intricate underlying structure, yet their complexity can obscure critical insights and risk propagating biases that disproportionately affect vulnerable populations. Hence, this thesis introduces SHIELD: A SHapley and Information-theory based framework for Equitable Learning via Dissimilar feature grouping, which combines dissimilarity-driven feature grouping with interpretable latent representations to mitigate proxy bias and enhance equitable learning of the resulting model. By constructing a dissimilarity matrix based on conditional mutual information (CMI), features are grouped to weaken correlations that might encode sensitive attributes, reducing redundant signals that may contribute to unfairness. This automated approach is more efficient than clustering similar features and fixing problematic groups post-hoc. Group-specific autoencoders learn latent representations that summarise each group’s unique information while preserving a decoder-weight mapping back to the original features. This enables precise SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) value decomposition, leading to interpretable feature-level attributions despite dimensionality reduction. Experiments on four benchmark clinical datasets demonstrated that the proposed grouping approaches, greedy, Bicriterion, and K-plus anticlustering, achieved notable improvements in fairness metrics and produced more evenly distributed feature importance compared to raw features and traditional baselines. This was evident as grouping on average led to 9.47% improvement in the distance from origin of bias quadrant, which accounts for both explanation and prediction bias. In addition, the fairness overview score, which considers other typical fairness metrics as well, was improved by 2.42% when grouped by dissimilarity. While a modest reduction of 3.43% in accuracy and 5.16% in F1-score was observed, it remained within acceptable limits for clinical applications, demonstrating the feasibility of this fairness-performance trade-off. Overall, SHIELD provides a principled framework that integrates dissimilarity-based grouping, latent representation learning, and explanation-level auditing to promote equitable and explainable machine learning for health informatics.
Access status: Open Access ,
Frogs in farmland: Ecology in changing agricultural landscapes
(2026) Littlefair, Michelle
Amphibians are globally threatened, with habitat loss and fragmentation due to agricultural activities, posing substantial threats to many species. This thesis investigates the role of farm dams as habitats for amphibians within agricultural landscapes. I focused on the habitat value of farm dams, adult frog distribution, reproductive dynamics, and landscape features. Despite growing interest in human-made habitats in agricultural landscapes, there has been no comprehensive review of the literature on farm dams as habitat. This leaves gaps in our understanding of their broader biodiversity implications, and their value as habitat - particularly for frogs. While farm dams have been known to provide habitat for frog species, management interventions to improve dams as habitat have not been explored. In particular, enhancing dams by excluding livestock and encouraging native vegetation growth, to support adult frog populations and improve reproductive output. Additionally, little is known about the temporal and spatial dynamics of frog populations across agricultural landscapes. By addressing these gaps, this thesis examines the habitat value of farm dams for frogs, specifically how enhancing farm dams may support frog populations and reproductive success when compared to control dams.
Access status: Open Access ,
Essays on Inequality and Policy Design in Macroeconomics
(2026) Lian, Jiu
This thesis examines how inequality arises and how public policy shapes economic outcomes across several interconnected dimensions. It brings together questions related to racial income differences, education policy with externalities, and the forces that lead to wealth concentration at the top of the distribution. The analysis combines structural modeling, quantitative methods, and administrative and survey data to study how individual behavior and policy interventions interact over the life cycle and across generations. The thesis is organized into three chapters, each addressing one of these dimensions in greater depth. The first chapter documents how racial differences in labor income may simultaneously explain both crime and wealth disparities between Black and White individuals. Using an overlapping generations model that endogenously determines crime rates alongside consumption and savings decisions, we find that equalizing labor incomes results in a significant decline in both the Black crime rate and the proportion of Black individuals in the lowest wealth quintile. Higher crime and incarceration rates of Black individuals, on the other hand, do not significantly contribute to their low wealth. This is primarily because most crimes are committed by already poor and young individuals who are not saving in any case. The second chapter examines how optimal education subsidies adjust in the presence of consumption externalities. We derive an optimal education subsidy formula using estimable parameters in a context where individuals exhibit "keeping up with the Joneses" behavior. In a static model where agents invest in their own human capital, we find that a lower education subsidy is warranted when a consumption externality exists and income is insensitive to the subsidy. Conversely, in an intergenerational setup where parents decide on their children's human capital investments while facing consumption externalities, human capital tends to be underaccumulated. In this case, the marginal effect of the consumption externality on the education subsidy depends on long-run elasticities and distributional parameters, which can be estimated using sufficient statistics. The third chapter analyzes the mechanisms behind wealth concentration through a heterogeneous quantitative model calibrated to Norwegian administrative data. The model incorporates three mechanisms: superstar worker states, entrepreneurial activity, and intergenerational wealth transfer. It matches both the cross-sectional wealth concentration and the wealth dynamics of New Money and Old Money households. We conduct counterfactual experiments to isolate the role of each mechanism. Removing the superstar worker state mainly reduces overall inequality but has little effect on the top 1\% wealth share. Shutting down entrepreneurial activity lowers the wealth concentration at the very top but has limited effects on the overall distribution. Equalizing inheritances reduces the initial wealth gap between New Money and Old Money and significantly slows down Old Money's wealth accumulation process. Taken together, the results show that labor income heterogeneity shapes income inequality, entrepreneurship drives wealth accumulation at the very top, and intergenerational transfers determine the early-life wealth positions that lead to the persistent gap between New Money and Old Money.
Access status: Open Access ,
Exploring the role of Medicare-funded private practice telepsychiatry, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic
(2026) Woon, Luke
Background: Limited telepsychiatry, in the form of synchronous ICT-based consultations, was available through Medicare Benefits Schedule (MBS) since 2000s. Limited Medicare Benefits Schedule (MBS) video telepsychiatry commenced in the early 2000s. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it was expanded nationwide in March 2020 and consolidated in January 2022. However, a synthesis of current evidence and research on its impact on access, cost, and implementation in pragmatic settings was still lacking. Objectives: (1) Synthesise the evidence of Australian telepsychiatry, (2) Examine telehealth policies' impact on the usage trends of general MBS psychiatric consultations and telepsychiatry, (3) Investigate the out-of-pocket (OOP) costs of MBS telepsychiatry, and (4) Explore the implementation of telepsychiatry in private practices. Methods: (a) A scoping review of the literature on Australian telepsychiatry (1990-2022). Using aggregate MBS usage data: (b) Comparison of MBS telepsychiatry and consultant physician telehealth (2017-22); Regression analyses on the: (c) Seasonality of telepsychiatry (2016-23); (d) Impact on total and face-to-face (F2F) psychiatric consultations (2012-23); (e) Impact on telepsychiatry consultations (2016-23); (f) Effects on per capita psychiatric consultations (2005-23); (g) Ratio of one-off to follow-up consultations (2016-23); and (h) Single-year (2021-22) telepsychiatry OOP costs. Person-level data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics: (i) Determinants of video telepsychiatry provision (2017-23); (j) Telepsychiatry and ADHD drug prescriptions (2017-23); and (k) multiple-year (2017-23) telepsychiatry OOP costs. (l) A mixed-methods study (a survey and interviews of psychiatrists) on the normalisation of telepsychiatry. Results: (a) Few existing longitudinal or economic telepsychiatry studies existed. Telepsychiatry perceptions involved patient benefits, clinical care, sustainability, and technological impact. Research gaps were patient perspectives, outcomes, clinical practice, health economics, usage trends, and technical issues. (b) MBS psychiatrist services shifted more substantially to telehealth than physician services, especially since early 2022. (c) Total psychiatric consultations were seasonal before and after telehealth expansion, but telepsychiatry was not. (d) & (e) Total consultations increased significantly alongside telepsychiatry after adjusting for lockdown severity, but F2F consultations decreased. More telepsychiatry services were used in psychiatrist-density regions. Males and those >65y showed greater relative usage growth. (i) Video consultations became as widespread as F2F consultations, more prominently among metropolitan providers and varied by patient characteristics. (f) Telepsychiatry reduced per capita consultation variability and contributed to more equitable service utilisation by complementing F2F consultations, with a larger effect for items targeting rural populations. (g) One-off video consultations surged after consolidation, notably among youths (15-24y) and young adults (25-44y), and trended upward among young females. (j) Concurrently, linked-ADHD prescriptions soared, particularly for female patients and through one-off sessions. (h) & (k) Compared with F2F consultations, video consultations were increasingly more costly, especially for rural patients and ADHD prescriptions. (l) Solo or non-metropolitan practices, and higher cognitive participation and collective action, were associated with greater adoption of telepsychiatry. A conducive environment, perceived benefits, and individual initiatives also contributed. Conclusions: Telehealth-enabling policies have reduced access barriers and integrated telepsychiatry into standard care. However, rising costs and shifting clinical focus (e.g., one-off ADHD sessions) may exacerbate inequity, necessitating policy refinement to clarify its purposes, maximise benefits, and mitigate unintended effects.
Access status: Open Access ,
Exploring mechanisms of inhibition and inactivation in voltage-gated sodium channels using molecular simulations
Tao, Elaine
Voltage-gated sodium (Nav) channels play a pivotal role in the conduction of electrical signals across the human body, with different subtypes expressed across excitable tissue in the brain, heart and muscle. Nav channels transiently form transmembrane pores by cycling through the closed, open and fast-inactivated states to control the sodium ion flux across the membrane and initiate the firing of nerve and muscle cells. Dysfunction in Nav channels is implicated in numerous diseases, including epilepsy, cardiac arrhythmias, paralysis and genetic pain conditions, which are commonly treated using small molecule drugs that inhibit their activity by blocking the pore. This thesis explores the use of molecular simulations to understand how the Nav channel interacts with modulatory molecules of interest, such as pore-inhibiting drugs and endogenous lipids, as well as how its dynamics are altered by specific mutations. Since majority of Nav channel inhibitors bind in the highly conserved pore, they typically cannot selectively target just one subtype, thus leading to adverse side effects. Chapter two investigates the dynamic nature of the membrane-facing pore fenestrations, showing that three out of the four fenestrations are wide enough for drug passage. However, there is a lack differences between the subtypes, suggesting the infeasibility for subtype-selective drug access routes via the fenestrations. Building on this, Chapter three examines where a structurally diverse range of compounds bind in the Nav channel. Enhanced simulations suggest that each drug can adopt a variety of favourable binding sites in the pore, with certain drugs occupying the central cavity, whereas some smaller drugs preferred to bind within the fenestrations. Aside from exogenous drugs, phosphoinositides, a class of negatively charged phospholipids in the inner leaflet of the membrane, have been experimentally shown to modulate Nav channel activity, however the molecular basis of such modulation is unclear. In Chapter four, multi-scale simulations reveal the phosphoinositide binding site and provide mechanistic insight into how this could enhance the channel's ability to inactivate. Conversely, certain disease mutations are known to attenuate or abolish inactivation, leading to excessive neuronal activity. In Chapter five, a de novo mutation causing severe epilepsy, is characterised experimentally and computationally. Electrophysiology data show that the mutant Nav channels exhibit persistent, non-inactivating sodium current. Additionally, in both unbiased and enhanced simulations, mutations to this residue interaction lead to destabilisation of the region responsible for fast inactivation. Finally, Chapter six examines the dynamic range of structures across the voltage-gated ion channel superfamily and the potential of using AlphaFold2 to predict different conformational states. Some voltage-sensing domains in the superfamily are consistently generated in one state, whereas others produced a variety of conformations. Notably, one of the Nav channel's four heterologous voltage sensor is predicted in a range of intermediate states with further conformational heterogeneity evident in the pore and fast inactivation gate. Overall, this work provides insights into the molecular mechanisms underlying Nav channel modulation and dysfunction. By integrating various computational approaches, the findings pave the way for more effective drug design and a deeper understanding of Nav channel-related diseases.
Access status: Open Access ,
Lifetime measurements of the 2^{+}_{1} states in even-even platinum isotopes with A = 180-186
(2026) Kono, Rikako
The neutron-deficient even-mass platinum isotopes have long been of interest for their transitional shapes and the emergence of shape coexistence. The more neutron-rich ^{190-198}Pt isotopes have weakly deformed, oblate structures in their ground states and show some evidence of triaxiality. In contrast, the lighter mid-shell isotopes ^{178-186}Pt exhibit prolate ground states and clear evidence of shape coexistence, with ^{188}Pt as a transition point between two regions. These platinum isotopes present a notably complex evolution of shapes and shape coexistence that would benefit from further investigation. The lifetimes of 2^+_1 states and the B(E2; 2^+_1\rightarrow0^+_1) reduced transition strengths are valuable to give insight into the magnitude of the nuclear deformations and their shape. However, there are significant discrepancies in 2^+_1 lifetimes for the shape-coexistence region, ^{180-186}Pt, from the Evaluated Nuclear Structure Data File (ENSDF) database and more recent measurements using methods such as the recoil distance method (RDM) and the Generalised Centroid Difference (GCD) method. To address this puzzle, we performed direct-timing lifetime measurements of the 2^+_1 states in ^{180-186}Pt using exponential-convoluted Gaussian fitting and GCD methods applied to \gamma-fast timing data taken with LaBr_3(Ce) detectors at the Australian Heavy Ion Accelerator Facility (HIAF) in August and September 2023. The 2^+_1 lifetimes obtained from both the convolution and GCD methods are in agreement, yielding results of 533(26)~ps, 561(14)~ps, 479(6)~ps and 350(4)~ps for ^{180-186}Pt, respectively. The measurements for ^{180}Pt and ^{186}Pt in the present study are consistent with ENSDF, and those for ^{182}Pt align with a recent result. However, a discrepancy is observed between our measurement and the ENSDF data for ^{184}Pt, suggesting to revisit the lifetime measurement for this isotope. Our experimental values were then compared to the results obtained from an empirical multi-band-mixing model to clarify the underlying shape assignments. The calculation considering shape coexistence reproduced the experimental B(E2; 2^+_1\rightarrow0^+_1) values well, thereby further emphasising the presence of shape coexistence in these regions. A new passive-shielding array for LaBr_3 detectors for future lifetime measurements has been designed, built and incorporated into the CAESAR gamma-ray detector array. The first test experiments with the new shields were performed in October 2025, and the results are currently being analysed.
Access status: Open Access ,
Application of Stable and Efficient Wide bandgap Perovskite on Perovskite/Si Tandem Solar Cells
(2026) CHANG, Li-Chun
Metal halide perovskites (MHPs) have advanced rapidly as photovoltaic absorbers owing to their strong optical absorption, long minority-carrier diffusion lengths, bandgap tunability, and compatibility with solution processing. Wide-bandgap (WBG, ≈1.63-1.8 eV) compositions are particularly attractive as top cells in perovskite/Si tandems yet inverted (p-i-n) WBG devices remain limited by interfacial non-radiative recombination, extraction barriers arising from imperfect interface energy alignment, and halide-segregation induced instability. Chapter 1 surveys perovskite photovoltaics with an emphasis on WBG devices: fundamental MHP properties (crystal/phase stability, defect tolerance, optical constants, carrier transport), device architectures (single-junction and perovskite/Si tandems), and the specific requirements and pain points of WBG top cells: open-circuit voltage (Voc) deficit, fill-factor (FF) loss from contact resistance and interfacial energy barrier, and light-driven phase segregation. Chapter 2 develops a buried-interface passivation strategy for inverted WBG perovskite solar cells (PSCs). Interlayers (e.g., ammonium halides and conjugated polyelectrolytes) are inserted between the hole transport layer (HTL) and perovskite to promote the perovskite growth, passivate interfacial defects, and mitigate ionic migration. The study combines steady-state photoluminescence (PL), water contact angle measurement, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), grazing incidence X-ray diffraction (GIXRD), space charge limited current (SCLC) measurement to evidence the formation of the two-dimensional (2D) perovskite, reduced non-radiative recombination and improved contact quality. Device metrics [JV, stabilized power output, external quantum efficiency (EQE)] and light-stress testing confirm gains in power conversion efficiency (PCE) alongside enhanced operational stability. Chapter 3 advances a complementary energy-level alignment strategy at the perovskite/HTL interface. Self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) with tunable dipoles, exemplified by blending phosphonic-acid carbazole derivatives, are used to deepen the HTL work function (WF) and mitigate the hole-injection barrier introduced by WBG perovskites’ deeper valence bands. Work-function/valence-band alignment is quantified by Kelvin probe force microscopy (KPFM) mapping with improved homogeneous potential distribution. Which aligned with the reduced of the surface roughness as suggested by the atomic-force microscopy (AFM). Which allows void-less perovskite surface observed in the SEM. The interactions between cations and anions with SAMs functionalized with additional methyl groups on the benzene ring were probed using Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), steady-state electroluminescence (EL), PL, and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). The blended SAMs have been incorporated into the device with the quasi-Fermi level splitting (QFLS) suggested negligible loss of carrier transport at the interface. The device modelling COMSOL Multiphysics software results indicate that improper energy alignment at the HTL/perovskite interface creates an unfavourable energy barrier, which hinders efficient charge transfer. A mechanically stacked, four-terminal (4T) perovskite/Si tandem configuration was accomplished using an industrially prevalent Si bottom cell structure, the tunnel oxide passivated contact (TOPCon) Si cell. Device metrics (JV, stabilized power output, EQE) and light-stress testing confirm gains in PCE alongside enhanced operational stability. Chapter 4 synthesizes the findings and outlines future work: co-optimizing buried passivation and dipole engineering; improving ultraviolet (UV)/thermal robustness of HTLs and passivants; and tandem-oriented optical engineering [e.g., refractive-index-matched interlayers and thinner sputtered transparent conductive oxide (TCO)] to minimize parasitic while preserving stability. Collectively, the thesis identifies buried-interface loss as the dominant bottleneck in WBG inverted PSCs and delivers two experimentally validated, complementary routes: defect passivation and energy-level alignment, that reduce interfacial recombination, strengthen carrier selectivity, and improve stability. The resulting design rules are readily transferrable to scalable fabrication and accelerate the deployment of high-performance, stable WBG top cells for monolithic perovskite/Si tandems.
Access status: Open Access ,
Mastering old age : Buddhist practice and techniques of the self among elderly laywomen in Ho Chi Minh City
(2016-09) Le, Hoang Anh Thu
This thesis is an anthropological study of old age and Buddhism in Vietnam. It explores how Vietnamese women utilise Buddhist practice to navigate the late stage of life. Embedded in the context of a fast growing aging population and the present lack of studies that focus on aging in Vietnam, this research looks to contribute to the understanding of aging and the life course, and the role of religious practice in informing and reconstructing the everyday experience of being old in Vietnam. This research shows that Buddhism is a regime of practice that elderly women follow in their everyday life. As a daily practice, Buddhism shapes women’s experience of being old, by transforming the temporal and spatial structure of their everyday lives, and extending their social networks and engagements far beyond their families and feminine roles at home. Buddhist imaginaries and conceptualisations of life redefine the way women conduct themselves in their everyday lives and perceive and live out their roles at home and in wider society. In the process, elderly women also transform Buddhist practice to make it respond to their lived realities. Buddhism is lived out by elderly women not as a doctrine but as a practical way of life. The way of life that Buddhism carves out for its elderly adepts is embedded in the socioeconomic landscape of the contemporary socialist market economy in Vietnam and is imprinted with its practitioners’ gender- and age-specific habitus. This research finds out that Buddhism is also a set of techniques that work on the self, through which elderly women redefine their relational personhood in their interactions with their families and the wider society. Buddhism provides its elderly adepts with self-mastery resources which enable them face the dreadful thresholds of the final stage of life. As a technique of the self, Buddhism enables elderly practitioners to adjust their identities and personhood, which in turn give them a sense of purposefulness, agency and control over the various realities that emerge in the course of old age, such as physical decline, ambiguities in identity and loss of agency at the end stage of life. Old age is therefore mastered with Buddhist practice, and is transformed from a life stage of marginality and infirmity, to an experience of continuing personal development and empowerment.
Access status: Open Access ,
Learning Realistic Asset-Oriented Human Interaction and Animation
(2026) Wang, Rong
Modelling diverse and complex human activities is a fundamental research topic in computer vision and graphics, as it enables a wide range of applications such as extended reality, digital humans, video game and movie creation. In many realworld scenarios, human activities often involve additional object assets, for example, interactions with handheld items such as tools or sports equipment, or animations of avatars wearing complex apparel like coats or dresses. Meanwhile, generating such interaction and animation scenes conditioned on the given assets in a realistic manner can be challenging, as it requires in-depth understanding of the spatial and temporal relationships between the humans and assets. In this thesis, we tackle this challenge of generating asset-oriented human interaction and animation at a higher level of realism, offering an immersive user experience for downstream applications. In the first part of the thesis, we focus on the task of interacting hand-object pose estimation. To ensure that the reconstructed hand and object poses conform to contact dynamics, we develop novel physics-inspired network architectures by explicitly incorporating contact heuristics as an inductive bias in the network design. In the first work, we reformulate hand-object interaction modelling from previous approaches that encode sparse keypoint-level dependencies to a new representation based on actual surface-level contact points. This allows us to capture proximity relationships between hand and object vertices using dense graph attention, enabling the network to automatically infer plausible contact regions. To further enforce real-world physical constraints, in our second work, we extend to incorporate more complex contact heuristics, i.e. stable grasping against gravity. Since contact dynamics are well implemented in modern physics simulators, we propose to distill their knowledge from simulation and transfer it to the base pose estimation model, which is the key for reconstructing simulation-aligned stable configurations. In the second part of the thesis, we investigate effective approaches for generating realistic animations of clothed human avatars. Since human bodies and apparels exhibit distinct dynamical properties, our key insight is to decompose the animation of a holistic clothed human avatar into independent, interpretable components that can be modelled and supervised separately. In this first work, we begin with stylised characters wearing complex accessories, where we animate their rigid body motion and non-rigid apparel motion via skinned deformation and auto-regressive vertex displacement respectively, allowing us to produce visually appealing dynamical effects for the apparels. Next, we extend this approach to real humans reconstructed from casually captured phone photos. Specifically, we develop a universal clothed human model that jointly decomposes personalised avatar shapes, skinning weights, and pose-dependent cloth deformations, achieving superior model robustness and generalisability. Finally, we apply the proposed decomposition principle to improve cloth animation generation with fine-grained dynamics such as wrinkles and folds. In this last work, we represent cloth motion via decomposed low-frequency posed shapes and high-frequency wrinkle details, which mitigates spectral bias in neural networks and facilitates the learning of high-fidelity cloth movements. In summary, this thesis presents five works aimed at improving the reconstruction realism of asset-oriented human interaction and animation. We validate our methods across multiple applications, including interacting hand-object pose estimation, 3D motion transfer, and animatable clothed human reconstruction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approaches achieve superior fidelity and plausibility compared to existing methods, advancing the state of the art in understanding human behaviours involving diverse real-world assets.
Access status: Open Access ,
Epidemiological investigation of diseases of public health importance in Victoria, Australia
(2017-07) Arnott, Alicia
In this thesis, I present the projects and activities I have undertaken as a Master of Philosophy in Applied Epidemiology (MAE) Scholar in Victoria between February 2015 and September 2016. I was placed with the Communicable Disease Epidemiology and Surveillance (CDES) Unit at the Victorian Department of Health and Human Services, and the Victorian Infectious Diseases Reference Laboratory (VIDRL) Epidemiology Unit. Through these placements I experienced the day-to-day activities of a state public health unit as well as an applied public health research environment. I conducted a cohort study to identify the source of a large, highly publicised outbreak of Salmonella Typhimurium at a five-star hotel in Melbourne, which was identified as raw-egg mayonnaise used in sandwich fillings served at a High Tea. For my data analysis project, I investigated the epidemiology of legionellosis in Victoria between 2000 and 2015 to determine whether the ubiquity of the Legionella pneumophila specific urinary antigen test is creating an 'epidemiological blind spot' for non - Legionella pneumophila infections. I found that whilst this method was ubiquitous prior to and during the study period, the rate of infection with non-Legionella pneumophila species did not decline in parallel as expected if urinary antigen testing routinely precluded their detection. I evaluated the complex Victorian influenza surveillance system, which involved analysis of data captured by the system from 2005 - 2014. As a whole, the system was found to perform well and the data collected were used to inform public health activities. Geographic representativeness of syndromic ILI data was high, demonstrating its utility as a surveillance tool, and the widespread uptake of molecular diagnostic testing enhanced overall system sensitivity, timeliness and flexibility. In addition, the data collected enabled robust estimates of seasonal vaccine effectiveness to be determined which informs local public health action and global vaccine development. However, important deficiencies that prevent the system from achieving a number of its objectives were identified. Most importantly, the ability of the current system to guide planning and implementation of policy and to detect and control outbreaks is limited, and laboratory testing denominator data are not available to facilitate interpretation of seasonal trends and true influenza incidence. My epidemiological project was an analysis of whether registering with Spleen Australia [formerly the Victorian Spleen Registry (VSR)], which provides education, clinical guidance and health promotion reminders, reduces the incidence of overwhelming post splenectomy infection amongst Victorian registrants without a spleen. By conducting a survival analysis, I found that VSR registration was indeed associated with a highly significant (p<0.001) 88% reduction in the incidence of severe infection amongst splenectomised registrants. Finally, I present two teaching activities conducted during my MAE: a session on how to conduct outbreak investigation interviews and a lesson from the field highlighting the utility and pitfalls of culture-independent diagnostic testing when investigating an outbreak of Shigella. This thesis provides an account of my MAE experience, fulfills the requirements of the program and outlines the contribution my work has made to public health in Victoria.

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