Visiting  Scholars

Dr Naomi Carver is working with Professor Eileen Murphy on the publication of a monograph exploring coarse earthenware pottery in Ulster in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The publication will be based on Dr Carver's PhD research and will address a gap in existing knowledge about locally produced pottery, examining how material culture can be used to explore social and cultural change.

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 Sibylle Heilbrunn (Full Professor) from the Kibbutzim College for Education, Technology and the Arts is collaborating with Dr Merav Amir from the School of Natural and Built Environment on spaces of neoliberalism and inequalities.  Similarities and differences of the entrepreneurial ecosystems in Belfast and Tel Aviv are compared, focusing on center-periphery divide, parallel economies and processes of metropolization.  Together with other researchers, they currently explored funding opportunities for expanding the project including through the ESRC and the ERC. 

I am working with Dr Ofterdinger to investigate, using a previously developed groundwater flow and transport model, the influence of adsorption on the migration of given pollutants in the Kandi basin (Northern Benin). The involved migration times and distances will be compared with the advective simulations previously carried out.

Results are expected to indicate locations within the Kandi-basin that require specific regulations for the groundwater quality preservation.

This collaborative effort between the QUB and Benin is supported by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

Leavitt, Prof Peter

Dr. Peter Leavitt FRSC FRSB is Distinguished University Professor and was three-term Canada Research Chair in Environmental Change and Society at University of Regina, Canada. His research investigates how human activities and climate variability interact to regulate water quality and, in turn, how freshwaters affect societal and climatic systems.  His visiting research is a collaboration with QUB Geography (Dr. Helen Roe, Dr. Graeme Swindles), Biological Sciences (Dr. Jaimie Dick) and AFBI (Dr. Yvonne McElarney) to determine the timing, causes, and trajectory of water quality degradation in Northern Ireland.  Initial focus will be on Lough Neagh, which Dr. Leavitt worked on 20 years ago.  The new project will determine how recent changes in agricultural and urban nutrient inputs have altered the production, composition, and toxicity of primary producers (phytoplankton) in the Lough, particularly during the 21^st century.  In time, this project will be expanded to other Northern Irish water bodies of interest, including Lough Erne, Portmore Lough, Loch Melvin, and Strangford Lough.  Ultimate the goal of the project is to define an actionable target for water quality improvement in degraded Irish lakes.

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.

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. 

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 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.

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.

Dr Zormpa will collaborate with Dr Schmitt in simulating the flow around cross-flow marine turbines using the actuator line method within computational fluid dynamics simulations. The aim of our work is to assess the applicability of actuator methods in predicting the complex hydrodynamic interactions of cross-flow turbines. We will combine our expertise in actuator methods and marine simulations, as well as utilise measurements from highly-instrumented utility scale cross-flow turbines provided by ORPC to validate our models. The project is funded by the UKRI Supergen ORE Hub.

Visiting Students

Bahareh Mehrmousavi is a researcher from the University of Salerno, Italy, researching Energy Harvesting with Offshore systems, especially focusing on Wave Energy and Offshore Wind Turbines on Floating Platforms using DualsPhysics software. To gain a deep understanding and extend the research for hybrid marine platforms, I share information and collaborate with other experts in the fields of renewable energy and offshore technology. At Queen’s,  researching these offshore renewable energy systems under the supervision of Dr Madjid Karimirad (Queen’s University Belfast, UK). This mainly includes fluid-structure interactions under environmental loading such as wave and wind using Smoothed-particle hydrodynamics (SPH).

Piasentin, Louis 

Visiting Student