Built environment research degrees

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.