Skip to Content

PhD & Research Degrees

PHD

Higher Degrees by Research lead to either Masters or Doctoral awards and are designed to assist graduates in investigating and contributing to advanced knowledge in their chosen discipline and to develop proficiency in conducting research.

The Faculty of Human Sciences brings together a diverse range of disciplines that share a common interest in human development, education, communication and healthy functioning across the lifespan.

The Faculty promotes cross-disciplinary research and offers a stimulating research environment for students.  It incorporates the following entities:

Students are actively encouraged to engage with other researchers through regular seminars, workshops and supervisory teams.  The annual, student-run Research Festival provides an opportunity for all research students in the Faculty to present their work in an inter-disciplinary environment.

School of Education

Education at Macquarie has a strong postgraduate focus and offers research programs which cover the spectrum of education across the lifespan from primary and secondary school education, through to research into TAFE, vocational and higher education research. The Department also offers research programs with a focus on educational leadership and management in schools, and learning in other professional areas such as medicine, science, technology and the environment. The centres supporting these research programs include: the Macquarie ICT Innovations Centre and the Centre for Research in Mathematics and Science Education (CRIMSE).

Conferences held during the year provide the opportunity for commencing candidates to present their thesis proposals to a wider audience and receive feedback on them, enabling them to address any potential difficulties early in their candidature. Monthly student forums are also held to discuss relevant issues or provide useful research training sessions such as NVIVO or Endnote. A research digest, Educational Research at Macquarie (eRAM) is published annually to facilitate networking and communication by providing useful thumbnail descriptions of active research projects being undertaken within the departments.  

All of these features have created a research culture founded on collaboration, support, and networking, contained within a climate that allows student and academic staff research to be sustained in an atmosphere of mutual support and collaboration. 

Department of Cognitive Science

The Department of Cognitive Science is a research department which carries out research and PhD supervision across a wide range of domains of cognitive science, including memory, language, belief formation, perception in action, and reading. The Department hosts the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders, which brings together researchers from the Departments of Cognitive Science, Psychology and Linguistics at Macquarie University and thirteen other national and international institutions.

Staff provide a supportive and interactive research environment for all research members, including students. The major thrust of Department research is to carry out studies of people with acquired or developmental disorders of one or other of these domains as a way of learning more about the normal processes of cognition.

The Department conducts research and research training in cognitive science primarily in three general domains of cognition:
  •  
  • language 
  • visual cognition program 
  • belief formation program 

The Department has a variety of laboratories including a high performance computational modelling laboratory and the KIT-Macquarie Brain Research Laboratory, which has the southern hemisphere's only magnetoencephalography (MEG) system.

Department of Health Professions

The Discipline of Physiotherapy joins the Australian School of Advanced Medicine in the Faculty of Human Sciences and is uniquely placed to have access to the new Macquarie University Hospital and Clinics. It will become part of a suite of existing and future health professional degrees (audiology, speech pathology, clinical and neuropsychology) at Macquarie University which will allow the course to offer interprofessional education in an integrated clinical setting.

Department of Linguistics

Linguistics at Macquarie is the largest and most diverse of all such departments in Australia. It has an excellent record of attracting and graduating research students from Australia and internationally.   Students can study on campus, in distance or online mode, or through blended modes of learning.

The research themes of the Department include:

  • functional grammar
  • discourse analysis and pragmatics
  • applied linguistics and language in education
  • professional and organisational communication
  • literacy education
  • language testing and program evaluation
  • lexicography
  • psycholinguistics
  • phonetics and phonology
  • translating and interpreting, including sign language
  • clinically-based work in speech pathology, communication disorders and audiology.

The Department incorporates the Centre for Language Sciences and the Adult Migrant Education Program (AMEP) Research Centres. It has well-established and purpose-built clinical facilities in audiology and speech pathology, together with excellent laboratory facilities for speech research.

Department of Psychology

Research conducted by staff and students within the Psychology Department is recognised nationally and internationally. 

Research degree students have a supportive and stimulating research environment. The Department has an excellent track record in:

  • contributions to staff and student academic publications
  • receiving external research income
  • the number of presentations and key-note speeches at symposia held within Australia and abroad.

Research students can pursue their interests across a variety of areas including:

  • animal behaviour and cognition
  • applied cognitive psychology
  • clinical neuropsychology
  • clinical psychology
  • learning theory and its applications (including driving behaviour)
  • neuroscience
  • organisational psychology
  • psychopathology.

The Department incorporates the Centre for Emotional Health, and runs the Anxiety Clinic and the Rod Power Psychology Clinic.  These provide services for the general public along with clinical training for students.

Institute of Early Childhood

The Institute of Early Childhood is committed to maximising opportunities for young children, families and communities through research, teaching, learning and advocacy. The Institute of Early Childhood is one of the oldest and largest early childhood teacher education and research departments in Australia. IEC's academic staff come from a range of professional and disciplinary backgrounds and their expertise includes early language and literacy development, numeracy development, educational change, outdoor play and risk taking, early intervention, infant-toddler play and pedagogy,  cross-cultural child rearing and socialization, leadership and mentoring, inclusion and working with families from diverse backgrounds and child development. Academic staff combine their professional expertise reflecting diverse disciplinary backgrounds including early childhood education, psychology, sociology, linguistics and arts-based education, in delivering both coursework programs and doctoral research supervision. The Children and Families Research Centre,  Mia Mia Child, Family Study Centre and Macquarie University Special Education Centre play a key role in IEC's research activities.

Students are actively encouraged to contribute to the early childhood research community at Macquarie University and beyond, through their involvement in various ways including participation in professional learning seminars, conferences, and publications. The successful completion of an early childhood research methods postgraduate certificate course at a high level can enable graduates without prior research training to seek entry into doctoral research studies. 

Macquarie University Special Education Centre

(MUSEC)Conducts research and teaching in Special Education.  It has a national and international reputation for the quality of its research, excellence in postgraduate teaching and its contribution to program development in the area of Special Education.

MUSEC staff include:

  • special educators
  • psychologists
  • teachers
  • therapists
  • researchers.

Complementary program development ensures that research findings are translated into practical applications for implementation by teachers who work with children with special needs in both regular and special schools.  

The Australian School of Advanced Medicine

The Australian School of Advanced Medicine, a graduate school located in a state-of-the-art research centre is the first school of its kind to offer sub-specialty, post-fellowship training in a private teaching hospital on a university campus.  It also provides an innovative competency-based education program featuring hands-on learning for surgeons and physicians. 

PhD programs are focused around:
  • Blood flow
  • Cardiorespiratory neuroscience
  • Clinical ethics
  • Molecular neuroscience
  • Neurosurgery
  • Pharmacology
  • Physical science (medical physics, medical image processing, and radiochemistry)
  • Vascular surgery
  • Visual science  

The School brings together a group of world-class researchers, clinicians and educators to create an innovative competency-based training program with a focus on future trends in medicine.  We have several very active teams of research scientists and substantial grant support. 

[back to top]