Research Centres and Groups

Centre for Environmental  Management (CEM)

The Centre for Environmental Management is about providing knowledge and skills to achieve environmentally sustainable development in the dry tropics. It has six main fields of endeavour - marine, coastal, terrestrial and freshwater ecology, environmental resource economics, ecotoxicology & some associated social studies. The focus is on issues associated with sustainable regional development, accounting for the costs of environmental impact, biodiversity management, rehabilitation success, ecosystem functional indicators of environmental performance and integrated regional monitoring. 

Centre for Plant & Water and Science (CPWS)

The Centre for Plant & Water Science's mandate is to support research, post-graduate training and undergraduate teaching in the water and plant sciences. To do this effectively we draw upon a number of full-time academic and research-only staff, a healthy number of higher degree students, an enthusiastic complement of technical and administrative staff, and many volunteers too. We have created a critical mass of expertise and infrastructure in the plant and water sciences that allows us to research issues of plant production, utilisation and conservation, and related natural resource management of relevance to the sustainable development of Central Queensland and climatically similar regions around the globe. We focus on water and the environment, quality food and integrated production systems, and emerging plant industries. Most of our research is funded through Australian competitive grants and our outputs include books, book chapters, refereed journal article and conference and web presentations.

Centre for Railway Engineering (CRE)

CRE provides an excellent research concentration of several engineering disciplines as applied to rail research. CRE has a strong customer focus and endeavours to build a strong partnership between its researchers and the rail industry through high quality generic and commercial research, continuing professional education and consultancy services. CRE has expertise in train and wagon dynamics, simulation, structural fatigue, failure analysis, erosion control, driver advisory systems, condition monitoring and train control and brake systems.

Centre for Intelligent and Networked Systems (CINS)

The Centre for Intelligent and Networked Systems (CINS) was established in 2008 to provide a focus for university research in the general area of intelligent and networked systems and to establish strong and sustainable research relationships with both regional industry and external reasearch organisations. As such, it has four key research programs:

1. Agent-Based Systems

2. Computational Intelligence

3. Data Mining

4. Networked Systems

Power and Energy Centre (PEC)

The Power Engineering Research Group is looking to the future of electricity generation, transmission and distribution in its many forms. Our research currently includes areas such as Smart Grid, Renewable energy systems, Power quality, Electrical asset management as well as traditional generation, transmission and distribution systems. We are working collaboratively with industry to:

- Conduct research for innovative solutions to challenges in these areas using multidisciplinary research expertise. Results from this include the ongoing developments of Smart SWER and smart metering technologies.

- Facilitate interchange of ideas and collaboration among academia, industry and government on critical industry issues.

- Educate the next generation of power industry engineers.

Business Research Group

Specific areas of research of the Business Group are driven by industrial needs in securing access to adequate human and other resources, suppliers and new markets to remain competitive:

- Regional Labour Markets, Workforce Development and Human Resource Management.

- Regional Business Development.

- Valuations including land and property.

- Assessment of impacts of the Emission Trading Scheme.