Summer and Winter Research Program Scholarships
The UQ Summer Research Scholarship Program provides UQ students with an opportunity to gain research experience working alongside some of the University’s leading academics and researchers.
Each year the School of Social Science offers research placement opportunities for students through the UQ Summer Research Scholarship Program.
The UQ Winter Research Scholarship Program provides UQ students with an opportunity to gain research experience working alongside some of the University's leading academics and researchers.
Each year the School of Social Science offers research placement opportunities for students through the UQ Winter Research Scholarship Program.
Project title: | Using a Trauma Informed AI Toolkit in Organizational Service Delivery Contexts |
Hours of engagement & delivery mode | The project will be run for 4 weeks, between 30 June – 25 Jul 2025. The winter scholars are expected to spend an average of 20-36 hours per week on the project. The project will be offered on-site, with the possibility of arranging hybrid work days. |
Description: | Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabled tools are increasingly being used in social service delivery. While AI offers opportunities for more efficient, effective, and personalised service delivery, its integration in these practices can also result in new problems, reinforce disadvantages, and generating trauma or re-traumatising service users. Responding to this emerging problem, we developed a Trauma Informed AI Toolkit, designed to help organisations explore the role of AI in their service delivery workflows — both to assess existing AI-enabled services, as well as inform the design of new ones. This project will pilot the toolkit with a partner organisation, through a series of co-design activities to understand how the toolkits can be used by practitioners. This project is part of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society |
Expected learning outcomes and deliverables: | Gain hands on experience of data collection and analysis, by piloting the Trauma Informed AI toolkit with an industry stakeholder. An opportunity to gain experience of working with an interdisciplinary team to co-author research publication outputs from the project |
Suitable for: | Suitable for candidates with an interest in participatory design approaches and qualitative research methods, facilitating workshops and interviews, stakeholder management, and data analysis. Ability to work effectively both independently and as a member of a team. Good time management and planning skills, with a commitment to delivery |
Primary Supervisor: | A/Prof Suzanna Fay Dr Awais Hameed Khan |
Further info: |
Project title: | Designing Automated Tools to Support Welfare Rights Advocacy |
Hours of engagement & delivery mode | The project will be run for 4 weeks, between 30 June – 25 Jul 2025. The winter scholars are expected to spend an average of 20-36 hours per week on the project. The project will be offered on-site, with the possibility of arranging hybrid work days. |
Description: | Welfare rights legal centre specialists often need to make sense of a large volume of documents provided by Services Australia (Centrelink) when representing clients, to help them understand their rights, and contest unfair social security decisions, including debts. These documents can be both paper-based, or digital PDFs, comprising of hundrends and thousands of pages of unsorted, un-indexed client data, including letters, forms, and system generated screen shots of Centrelink computers. Lawyers must then trawl through these documents, reconstructing a client case history, while attempting to make sense of these documents, and decipher the decisions made by Centrelink and their underlying rationale. This project involves designing a software solution to help welfare rights legal centres in navigating and sensemaking these large volumes of complex, client data. This project is part of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society |
Expected learning outcomes and deliverables: | Gain practical hands-on experience of working in software development of a component of a large-scale software project, under the guidance of a lead software developer. An opportunity to gain experience of working with an interdisciplinary team to co-author research publication outputs from the project |
Suitable for: | This project is open to applications from students with a background in software engineering. Relevant experience required with web technologies and interpersonal skills, including:
Additionally, experience in working with document-analysis technologies, including is desirable:
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Primary Supervisor: | Dr Awais Hameed Khan Dan Tran |
Further info: |
Project title: | Archaeobotanical signatures of seed grinding: a microbotanical reference collection study |
Project duration: | 4 weeks (30 June to 25 July 2025), up to 36 hours per week (negotiable). The applicant will be required on-site at St Lucia campus for the project. |
Description: | The use of a wide variety of seeds for food by Indigenous Australians was widely documented during the ethnographic period, but has been more challenging to trace in the archaeological record. Microscopic residues of starch granules and phytoliths from the seeds of grasses, trees, shrubs and other plants found on the surfaces of grindstones can be used to document seed grinding in the past. Such studies rely on comprehensive reference collections to enable taxonomic identifications of the plant microremains. This laboratory-based project will involve the microscopic analysis of starch granules and/or phytoliths from modern reference taxa that were potentially used for food in the past by Indigenous Australians. |
Expected outcomes and deliverables: | The student will learn different aspects of laboratory analysis, including processing of plant reference material, light microscopy, and recording microremains using a morphological key, and will assist with data management including accessioning the results in the UQ Online Archaeobotany Reference Database. The student will be required to produce a report detailing their findings. |
Suitable for: | Undergraduate students (1st, 2nd or 3rd-year) in archaeology, environmental studies, palaeoecology, or similar. A high degree of enthusiasm for lab-based research is essential. Some experience in microscopy would be advantageous but is not necessary. |
Primary Supervisor: | A/Prof Alison Crowther |
Further info: | Please contact A/Prof Alison Crowther (a.crowther@uq.edu.au) for further information; all enquiries should be accompanied by your CV and academic transcripts. |