Projects

This research investigates and advances sustainable design practices in sub-tropical vernacular housing across India and Australia. Focusing on climate-responsive construction, locally sourced materials, and culturally embedded design strategies, it aims to adapt traditional wisdom into contemporary applications for resilient, low-impact, and context-specific built environments.

This research explores city-scale green space and urban forestry strategies to enhance sustainability, climate resilience, and public realm quality. It investigates integrative planning approaches, biodiversity enhancement, and ecosystem services, aiming to create adaptable, socially inclusive, and environmentally responsive urban landscapes for future-ready cities.

This project develops a Neighbourhood Sustainability Assessment Toolkit (NSAT) tailored to sub-tropical climates in India and Australia, integrating environmental performance, social well-being, and resource efficiency metrics to guide planners, designers, and policymakers in creating resilient, low-carbon, and inclusive neighbourhoods adaptable to diverse cultural and climatic contexts.

Anchored in the liveability-sustainability-imageability triad (LSI), this doctoral research project examines past and future dwelling-scale performance parameters in social and community housing developments across India and Australia through the quantitative and qualitative intersections of Architecture and Design Histories. On this front, large (major) sports events (such as the Olympics, Commonwealth, and Asian Games) are seen as crucial catalysts towards the systemic development of necessary housing stock (either initiated through governmental legislation or via private investment). It is, therefore, the ‘afterlives’ of these events that allow for this housing stock to effectively (re)integrate within the city. How have the New Delhi Masterplans worked towards this goal in the decades past and how will Brisbane follow up on a similar front in the near future? Could our proactive decision-making in the Indo-Australian geographical space then envisage this ‘post-event’ scenario of long-term use, strategically experimenting with typologies and patterns that have widespread utility?

This research investigates the rapid growth of the Indian diaspora in Australia and the multisited nature of contemporary migration, highlighting connections between India (origin), Australia (destination), and global third spaces. It seeks to map demographic shifts, analyse transnational networks, and uncover the economic, social, and political dynamics shaping the community. The study will provide fresh insights to support inclusive policymaking, strengthen diaspora engagement, and enrich the broader field of migration studies.

This project will focus on designing and developing high-performance electrocatalysts for metal–air batteries, a promising next-generation energy storage technology. The candidate will explore advanced materials and novel catalyst structures to improve battery efficiency and durability.

This research project will develop a new methodology for the fatigue life assessment of structural components, which will help to reduce the risk of catastrophic failures, improve reliability, and lower maintenance costs of high-value platforms. The project will develop a computational framework for fatigue crack growth. The results will be validated with experiments. Further machine learning models will be developed and trained using the experimental data.

The University of Queensland (Australia) and the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (India) are offering a joint PhD project on designing and developing advanced textile preforms for next-generation ceramic matrix composites (CMCs). These lightweight, thermally stable materials are vital for aerospace, defence, energy, and hypersonics. The project will combine IITD’s expertise in textile preform design with UQ’s world-class facilities in composite processing and characterisation, covering the entire innovation chain—from textile architecture optimisation to full CMC fabrication and testing. Using advanced imaging, modelling, and mechanical testing, the research will deliver predictive insights into how textile design impacts processing and performance, enabling more durable, scalable, and high-performance CMCs. This highly interdisciplinary PhD offers international collaboration, industry engagement, and the chance to contribute to cutting-edge solutions for aerospace and defence applications.

This project investigates how farming design on rooftops can be integrated with low-cost renewable energy technologies to create multifunctional urban building systems. Using modelling, simulation, and comparative case studies in India and Australia, the research will assess the impacts of these systems on crop yield, building energy efficiency, and carbon reduction. The study aims to provide scalable design strategies that contribute to food security, reduced energy demand, and climate-resilient urban development.

Existing benchmarks for affective computing for multimodal facial expression analysis grapple with two major limitations: (1) they often rely on facial action unit (AU) movement–based approaches to detect expressions, overlooking crucial cultural dimensions necessary for deeper understanding, and (2) many multilingual facial expression datasets are collected in controlled lab environments, limiting their reliability in real-world settings. To address these challenges, this project will propose a new benchmarking effort along with culturally specific adaptation of foundational models for evaluating culture-aware facial expression prediction across languages and regions.