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.

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. 

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.  

I am working with Dr Ofterdinger on the development of a groundwater flow and transport model for the Kandi basin (Northern Benin) with the use of isotopes data to constrain the developed model.

The developed modelled will be a guiding tool for various purposes including: (1) predictive evaluation of groundwater resources availability (with respect to various development scenarios) and (2) investigating the migration of elevated nitrate concentrations and other compounds of concern within the groundwater system.

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

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. 

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. 

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

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.