Skip to main content

Site navigation

  • University of Technology Sydney home
  • Home

    Home
  • For students

  • For industry

  • Research

Explore

  • Courses
  • Events
  • News
  • Stories
  • People

For you

  • Libraryarrow_right_alt
  • Staffarrow_right_alt
  • Alumniarrow_right_alt
  • Current studentsarrow_right_alt
  • Study at UTS

    • arrow_right_alt Find a course
    • arrow_right_alt Course areas
    • arrow_right_alt Undergraduate students
    • arrow_right_alt Postgraduate students
    • arrow_right_alt Research Masters and PhD
    • arrow_right_alt Online study and short courses
  • Student information

    • arrow_right_alt Current students
    • arrow_right_alt New UTS students
    • arrow_right_alt Graduates (Alumni)
    • arrow_right_alt High school students
    • arrow_right_alt Indigenous students
    • arrow_right_alt International students
  • Admissions

    • arrow_right_alt How to apply
    • arrow_right_alt Entry pathways
    • arrow_right_alt Eligibility
arrow_right_altVisit our hub for students

For you

  • Libraryarrow_right_alt
  • Staffarrow_right_alt
  • Alumniarrow_right_alt
  • Current studentsarrow_right_alt

POPULAR LINKS

  • Apply for a coursearrow_right_alt
  • Current studentsarrow_right_alt
  • Scholarshipsarrow_right_alt
  • Featured industries

    • arrow_right_alt Agriculture and food
    • arrow_right_alt Defence and space
    • arrow_right_alt Energy and transport
    • arrow_right_alt Government and policy
    • arrow_right_alt Health and medical
    • arrow_right_alt Corporate training
  • Explore

    • arrow_right_alt Tech Central
    • arrow_right_alt Case studies
    • arrow_right_alt Research
arrow_right_altVisit our hub for industry

For you

  • Libraryarrow_right_alt
  • Staffarrow_right_alt
  • Alumniarrow_right_alt
  • Current studentsarrow_right_alt

POPULAR LINKS

  • Find a UTS expertarrow_right_alt
  • Partner with usarrow_right_alt
  • Explore

    • arrow_right_alt Explore our research
    • arrow_right_alt Research centres and institutes
    • arrow_right_alt Graduate research
    • arrow_right_alt Research partnerships
arrow_right_altVisit our hub for research

For you

  • Libraryarrow_right_alt
  • Staffarrow_right_alt
  • Alumniarrow_right_alt
  • Current studentsarrow_right_alt

POPULAR LINKS

  • Find a UTS expertarrow_right_alt
  • Research centres and institutesarrow_right_alt
  • University of Technology Sydney home
Explore the University of Technology Sydney
Category Filters:
University of Technology Sydney home University of Technology Sydney home
  1. home
  2. arrow_forward_ios ... About UTS
  3. arrow_forward_ios ... Information on Faculties...
  4. arrow_forward_ios ... Faculty of Design, Archi...
  5. arrow_forward_ios ... Research
  6. arrow_forward_ios Study a research degree
  7. arrow_forward_ios Built environment research degrees

Built environment research degrees

explore
  • Research
    • Research expertise
      • arrow_forward Design agency and designing futures
      • arrow_forward Social justice in the built environment and society
      • arrow_forward Sustainable user behaviour and environmental performance
      • arrow_forward Technological and industrial transformation
      • arrow_forward Visualisation
    • arrow_forward Research in our schools
    • Study a research degree
      • arrow_forward 12 tips to applying for a research degree
      • arrow_forward Built environment research degrees
      • arrow_forward Design research degrees
      • arrow_forward Why research at UTS Design, Architecture & Building
Inside the Reading Room of the UTS Library

Join a dynamic and close-knit community of researchers and practitioners already shaping the built environment and its impact on society.

Over recent years, our School has built a reputation for research that delivers meaningful benefits to industry, government and the community. 

Now, we’re working in partnership with those same organisations to deliver academically rigorous, industry-informed built environment research for economic, environmental and social good.

Areas of practice

  • Planning
  • Property development
  • Construction management 
  • Project management
  • Real estate investment

Research themes

Resilient futures

Creating resilient and sustainable urban environments and projects with places, climate responsiveness and inclusiveness at their core.

Research stream leader: Gabriela Quintana Vigiola

Sustainable, economic and socially responsible development 

Delivering built environment interventions that improve ESG and community social and environmental wellbeing.

Research stream leader: Suhair Alkilani

Construction Industry Transformation

Driving new forms of construction and reshaping how major building and infrastructure projects are developed, designed, delivered and operated.

Research stream leader: Alireza Ahmadian Fard Fini

Dealing with Digital Disruption in the Built Environment

Empowering the built environment through technological change and digital innovations. 

Research stream leader: Saeed Banihashemi

A transdisciplinary approach

We welcome students from a broad range of disciplinary backgrounds, from those with existing built environment expertise to those seeking to develop an important new specialisation particular to the built environment. The richness of these diverse perspectives, including from fields such as health, management, data science and more, is an important feature of our work.

You’ll study under the guidance of leading academics whose built environment research is reshaping policy, industry and practice to have a lasting impact on society and the environment. Like our students, our academic community represents a rich mix of disciplinary backgrounds. We have an abundance of domestic and international expertise.

Meet our researchers

sara wilkinson

Professor Sara Wilkinson

Sara Wilkinson is a chartered building surveyor and Australia’s first female Professor of Property. Her transdisciplinary research program sits at the intersection of sustainability, urban development and transformation, with a focus on green cities and preparing our urban environments for the challenges of climate change. Recent projects include the use of virtual reality to assess customer willingness to invest in residential green infrastructure, the development of a prototype wallbot to inspect and monitor high-rise green walls, and the performance evaluation of hempcrete wall panels.

Sara is a passionate academic supervisor who oversees qualitative, quantitative and mixed-methods higher degree research projects. She works with students to design tailored research projects that capitalise on their interests, connect them to industry networks and deliver opportunities to produce conference presentations, journal papers and professional publications.

shanaka herath

Dr Shanaka Herath

Shanaka Herath is a lecturer and researcher with a decade of academic and policy experience, both in Australia and internationally. He teaches urban economics, urban planning and policy analysis; through his research, he explores the challenges associated with housing, cities and the economy, such as willingness to pay for urban amenities, housing affordability and urban disadvantage. As a supervisor, Shanaka offers deep quantitative research skills and extensive experience working with Australian socio-economic datasets, helping his students link urban analysis with policy outcomes. He holds a PhD in Urban and Real Estate Economics from Vienna University of Economics and Business (Austria).

Among his many accolades, Shanaka received the Peter Harrison Memorial Prize [State of Australian Cities (SOAC) Conference] in 2017 and the Vice-Chancellor’s Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship (University of Wollongong) in 2015.

martin loosemore

Distinguished Professor Martin Loosemore

Martin Loosemore is an award-winning researcher and Professor of Construction Management. His vast body of research is focused on maximising the positive social impact of the built environment industry, with a particular emphasis on innovation, construction industry reform, entrepreneurship, social enterprise and social procurement, among other areas. Martin’s work has received numerous international awards, has attracted more than $11 million in ARC funding in the last 10 years, and has been widely commercialised through a number of spin-out enterprises and joint ventures.

A highly experienced academic supervisor across quantitative and qualitative research projects, Martin works with small numbers of high-achieving, passionate and committed students who represent the best and brightest in their fields. He has supervised 25 higher degree research projects to completion and is dedicated to supporting students to develop resilience, intellectual insights and professional relationships that shape their academic careers.

Student story – Caroline Porto Valente, PhD student

If you’ve ever found yourself shuddering when you open your power bill, you’re not alone – according to PhD student Caroline Porto Valente, the high cost of gas and electricity is driving many Australian pensioners into a life of energy poverty.

caroline porto valente

The idea of energy poverty is that you’re either struggling with high energy bills, you’re spending a large portion of your income on energy costs, or you are restricting your energy consumption so that you keep your bills manageable. In some situations, especially among vulnerable groups, you’ll be doing so to the detriment of your physical and mental health.

Through her research, which is situated in the School of Built Environment, Caroline – who won three awards at the 2020 Pacific Rim Real Estate Society (PRRES) Conference for her work – is seeking to understand the lived experience of energy poverty among Australian pensioners, including its causes. Many pensioners live in homes that are old and poorly energy efficient; upgrading these homes and the energy systems that power them would have a positive benefit on residents’ health and wellbeing, as well as on Australia’s climate futures.

There are three main ways of making residential energy efficiency improvements: energy-efficient building envelopes, the use of energy-efficient operational appliances and the installation of low-carbon and renewable energy systems. As well as alleviating the pressure on people experiencing energy poverty, these upgrades could contribute to decarbonising this sector, meeting our targets for greenhouse gas emissions reduction, and improving the reliability and security of our energy infrastructure.

The research combines Caroline’s passion for social justice, and her desire to pursue built environment research that produces tangible, meaningful outcomes. UTS, with its commitment to research that drives social change, was the perfect place for her to land.

I wanted to do something that I know is going solve a real-world problem – that can improve people’s lives. That was definitely on my high-value list of why I chose UTS.

Student story – Jeff Scales, PhD Student

Jeff Scales had more than 20 years of project management experience behind him when he started teaching a subject called Systems Thinking in the UTS Master of Project Management. It was here that he stumbled across an idea that would shape his future academic career.

In the Systems Thinking subject, we were talking about system dynamics, and it’s something that’s used to model really big issues. I thought, wow, I can see how this could be used in project management.

That idea became a PhD in the UTS School of Built Environment, which Jeff commenced in 2016. His aim was to use systems dynamics to contemporise project scheduling techniques, moving the field away from its 1960s origins and giving it a refresh using modern technology.

I ended up doing a model that constructs schedules differently using these more modern approaches. I wanted to understand how can we change the way in which we structure problems to view them differently and perhaps see solutions that we hadn’t seen before?

Jeff’s research was supervised by Professor Shankar Sankaran, a high-profile Professor of Organisational Project Management who has supervised more than 30 doctoral students, and Dr Leila Moslemi Naeni, a senior lecturer in the UTS School of the Built Environment. What was notable about the supervisory process, Jeff says, is that his supervisors consistently challenged him to develop his own ideas using their guidance and support, rather than providing concrete advice about how and what to research.

jeff scales

Shankar has a particular way of approaching supervision – he’s an action learner, which means he will never give you an answer. Instead, he will try and lead you in the direction he thinks the answer is. There’s a gap between understanding the next step that we could take and streamlining the number of technological steps involved in doing that. The result is that you discover things yourself and you make up your own conclusions. So I feel as if I 100% own all of my research outputs because of that, and I feel confident in what I’ve done.

Degree offerings

  • Doctor of Philosophy
  • Master of Built Environment (Research)

Industry-based research programs are also available via the UTS Graduate Research School.

Acknowledgement of Country

UTS acknowledges the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation and the Boorooberongal People of the Dharug Nation upon whose ancestral lands our campuses now stand. We would also like to pay respect to the Elders both past and present, acknowledging them as the traditional custodians of knowledge for these lands. 

University of Technology Sydney

City Campus

15 Broadway, Ultimo, NSW 2007

Get in touch with UTS

Follow us

  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • YouTube
  • Facebook

A member of

  • Australian Technology Network
Use arrow keys to navigate within each column of links. Press Tab to move between columns.

Study

  • Find a course
  • Undergraduate
  • Postgraduate
  • How to apply
  • Scholarships and prizes
  • International students
  • Campus maps
  • Accommodation

Engage

  • Find an expert
  • Industry
  • News
  • Events
  • Experience UTS
  • Research
  • Stories
  • Alumni

About

  • Who we are
  • Faculties
  • Learning and teaching
  • Sustainability
  • Initiatives
  • Equity, diversity and inclusion
  • Campus and locations
  • Awards and rankings
  • UTS governance

Staff and students

  • Current students
  • Help and support
  • Library
  • Policies
  • StaffConnect
  • Working at UTS
  • UTS Handbook
  • Contact us
  • Copyright © 2025
  • ABN: 77 257 686 961
  • CRICOS provider number: 00099F
  • TEQSA provider number: PRV12060
  • TEQSA category: Australian University
  • Privacy
  • Copyright
  • Disclaimer
  • Accessibility