Our Researchers

Bringing Climate Solutions to Life: Digital Twins Meet Serious Games

Communities around the world face increasingly complex challenges as they adapt to climate change. From managing resources to planning resilient infrastructure, decisions need to be informed, collaborative, and forward-thinking.

This new research project, led by Dr Izni Zahidi, Civil Engineering at Monash University, and Dr Feng Mao, School for Cross-Faculty Studies at the University of Warwick, is exploring an innovative approach. The team are combining digital twins, virtual models of real-world environments, with serious games to make climate planning more interactive and accessible.

Understanding the Building Blocks of Symmetry

Mathematicians use the concept of a group to describe symmetry in an abstract way. Just as every whole number can be broken down into prime numbers, every finite group can be built from basic components called finite simple groups.

The Classification Theorem of Finite Simple Groups, a major achievement in modern mathematics, identifies all such basic components. However, to apply this knowledge to concrete scientific problems, we often need to understand more about how these components behave, and that’s the focus of this project.

Uncovering How Plants Contain Disease

When plants are infected by pathogens, they have an incredible ability to contain the threat and protect themselves via plant disease resistance genes. Traditionally, scientists have understood that this defence involves a process called programmed cell death, which creates a local “hypersensitive response” to contain the pathogen. Scientists know this defence happens, but the exact way plants manage to stop infections is still a mystery.

This new project, led by Professor Murray Grant from the School of Life Sciences at the University of Warwick and Professor Sureshkumar Balasubramanian from the School of Biological Sciences at Monash University, aims to find out whether tiny molecules called small RNAs (sRNAs) play key signalling roles in this process. These molecules act like messengers, controlling which genes are switched on or off, and could hold the secret to how plants contain infections.

Development of a One-Pot Enzymatic Approach for the Delignification and Bioconversion of Lignocellulose into Bioproducts

Agricultural activities generate vast amounts of plant-based waste, such as rice straw, wheat straw, and palm residues. While this biomass is rich in cellulose, which is a key source of sugars for producing a range of valuable products like textiles, renewable fuels and biodegradable plastics, it is locked behind lignin, a tough component that makes conversion difficult.

Current methods to remove lignin rely on harsh chemicals and high energy inputs, which are costly and harmful to the environment. This project aims to create a cleaner, more efficient solution.

Antimicrobial Resistance

The Monash Warwick Alliance has jointly invested in several major challenge-led initiatives which have the potential to produce truly transformational research. The World Health Organization has declared antimicrobial resistance (AMR) to be one of the top global public health threats - the Alliance is tackling AMR by training a future-ready workforce that can drive the next wave of scientific discoveries and their translation into clinical settings.

Particle Physics

What are the basic building blocks of matter? What are the fundamental interactions? What happened in the earliest stages of the Universe, and how did that result in what we observe around us today? Large international collaborations are needed to progress towards answering these questions. Bringing together expertise from Warwick and Monash groups has created a unique alliance that enables us to take ever-stronger leadership in these international endeavours.