Visiting  Scholars

Dr Bell is working with Prof Eileen Murphy and a number of colleagues within the School.  This will include work on:

- the significance of decorative motifs common to a range of Bronze Age artefact types inlcuding metal work and ceramics.  

 - Assist in the development of a UG module on Cognitive Thinking in relation to archaeological research. 

Dr. Carlo Bottaini is working with Prof. Dirk Brandherm on a multidisciplinary project that aims: a) to establish the sources of copper consumed in Ireland during the Late Bronze Age and to re-evaluate the changing role of the island in regional and inter-regional socio-economic interactions during this period; and b) to provide a more reliable chronological framework for Late Bronze Age Irish metallurgy and the copper procurement patterns underlying its production by undertaking a systematic radiocarbon dating programme of surviving wooden remains associated to metal artefacts.

The project intends to assess the relationship between changes in copper supply patterns and other major transformations in the archaeological record of the Irish Late Bronze Age, and it will also allow us to trace new connections between Ireland, the wider Atlantic world and the rest of Europe, helping us to reassess the role of a peripheral region such as Ireland within this/these network(s).

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.

The research cooperation with Prof. W. Sha will focus on the environmental friendly low-carbon cementitious building materials. Our aim in this research is to design a multiple cementitious system with different solid wastes, determine the synergistic hydration mechanism and the microstructure characteristics, and study the mechanical properties and durability of the high-performance concrete prepared by using this cementitious system.

The irruption of the in-between spaces in the social sustainability of divided cities. Evidence from Belfast, Northern Ireland"

This project pursues to understand the functioning of a divided city in order to better comprehend the contemporary world. By looking at different processes that take place in the in-between spaces of Belfast, this work presents a series of theoretical debates and develops a framework of analysis proposing a series of conceptual links between the formation of contested territories and the act to traverse them.

This work is the continuation of an awarded PhD thesis entitled “Intertwining the city. The in-between spaces
of Caracas as scenarios to achieve urban togetherness” (García Alcaraz 2022) to offer a comparative exercise
between two cities, Caracas and Belfast, and to establish a set of patterns in relation to the phenomenology of the border to understand urban divisions, which impede intercommunal cooperation between city units.

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. 

Dr Jon Hancock has a long standing relationship with many staff at Queen's University and is currently collaborating with Dr Madjid Karimirad on research into floating solar renewable energy systems.  This research into new floating solar technologies will enable energy from the sun to be harvested from otherwise unused bodies of water in-land, nearshore  and offshore.  This proivdes clean reliable renewable power for future generations, reducing the green house gas emissions and the global dependence on fossil fuels. 

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.

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 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. 

Dr Yue Song is a Chinese Scholarship Council funded visiting scholar from the Development and Research Center of the China Geological Survey. Yue is working with Professor Jennifer McKinley in the Centre for GIS and Geomatics. Yue will be working on a number of projects linked to the Horizon 2020 UPSURGE project, ESRC SPACE project and the IUGS Deep Time Digital Earth (DDE) programme. Yue will be using her expertise in GIS and 3D visualisation to build a 3D visualization of the geological and environmental setting of Belfast. In this research, we aim to design a whole space visual system based on the 3D geological model of Belfast, linked with geochemistry, engineering geological properties, DEM, remote sensing imagery, air quality and urban heat modelling. Through this modelling process, we will study the potential impact of environmental factors on health and wellbeing.

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

3D printing (or Contour Crafting) is currently one of the emerging topics of research for construction industry. The concrete layers are poured out by robotic machines and can be used for small-scale industrial parts and building structures. Inspired by the 3D printing with polymer materials, 3D printing opens new horizons to cement-based, materials of the construction industry.

The aim of my project is to investigate the effect of different mix composition on fresh and shrinkage properties of 3D printed mortar compared to normal vibrated mortars.

antoine.arzalier@etu.uca.fr

Researching coastal archaeology and the impacts of climate change, using remote sensing techniques to investigate and track coastal change and develop mitigation strategies to help the sector manage the threatened coastal archaeological resource.

In October of 2020, Emilie began her NERC (Natural Environmental Research Council) funded QUADRAT DTP PhD in Geoscience at the University of Aberdeen. Her research is to be conducted along side the ‘Chronologies and Changing Cultures on the Mongolian Steppe’ project under the supervision of Dr. Joshua Wright (University of Aberdeen) and Prof. Paula Reimer (14CHRONO Centre @ Qub). Her research will focus on compiling existing radiocarbon dates alongside newly dated samples from both northern and southern Mongolia, and aims to explore how nomadic pastoral communities of Mongolia adapted to the dynamic and changing environments of the Eurasian Steppe during the Middle Holocene, and the Bronze and Iron Ages. This project seeks to utilize the availability of high-quality chronological data to compile a model in which the periods of north-central Mongolia can be re-examined alongside attributes associated with these chronological periods such as; subsistence, monuments, and technologies in order to cross-examine these attributes against the changing environmental conditions of the Mongolian Steppe. Emilie will be conducting 14C dating at the 14CHRONO Centre for Climate, the Environment and Chronology at Queen’s University under the guidance of Prof. Reimer.

This research will build upon past research by (a) compiling existing radiocarbon dates, (b) collecting new radiocarbon dates from animal and human bone, (c) conducting Carbon and Nitrogen Stable Isotope analysis of both animal and human remains to examine changes in subsistence, herding and grazing (d) to explore the application of stable isotope analysis of elements such as C/N and oxygen as a proxy for environmental and landscape change to explore periods of climatic change, and (e) to construct a synthesis of new and existing data into a high-resolution chronological model focused within the Egiin Gol area, in which cultural changes can be examined against environmental data to explore responses to dynamic environments and identify the ‘moments’ of change. 

Sunjay Mathuria is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Geography, Planning & Environment at Concordia University.  He is a Visiting Student in the School of Natural and Built Environment and is assisting Dr. Agustina Martire's senior-level studio StreetSpace project on Open Botanic.  His PhD research focuses on urban memory and narratives of memorialization.