Explore a range of project management research internships to complete as part of your degree during the semester break.
The following internships listed are due to take place across the semester break.
Applications open 10th September and close 30th September 2025.
Supervisor: A/Prof. Ken Chung
Eligibility: Distinction average, interviewing skills, qualitative data analysis
Project Description:
The majority of today’s project professionals did not set out to become project managers—they arrived at their roles through unplanned pathways. In response to this trend, significant investments have been made across industry and academia to support the intentional development of project leadership capabilities.
This research project investigates the career trajectories of graduates from the Bachelor of Project Management (BPM) program. The study aims to understand how these individuals have navigated their professional journey, including their experiences within industry, the challenges they have encountered, and the dilemmas they have faced.
This experience will be particularly valuable for students with interests in project management, leadership, organisational studies, or social research, and may serve as a foundation for future honours or postgraduate research.
Requirement to be on campus: No
Supervisors: Dr Xinyue Zhang
Eligibility: Proficiency in reading and writing Chinese characters to analyse raw data from case materials.
Project Description:
The dual nature of major infrastructure projects as both public goods and commodities necessitates a unique approach to their governance. These projects are critical for providing fundamental public services and supporting societal and economic development. Simultaneously, they operate within a market-driven environment where resource allocation and stakeholder interactions are guided by market principles.
This duality poses significant challenges for project governance, which must extend beyond traditional project management practices to encompass broader governance domains influenced by both government and market forces. This project aims to explore the governance model of major infrastructure projects, investigating the combined influence of government and market forces. The research will adopt multiple case studies, examining some prominent projects worldwide.
The findings are expected to reveal the intricate dynamics of government and market participation across different organisational levels and phases of major infrastructure projects. The successful candidate will conduct data collection and analysis of case materials, and draw organisational design models of infrastructure projects.
Requirement to be on campus: No
Supervisors: Prof. Stewart Clegg, Dr. Xinyue Zhang
Eligibility:
Project Description:
We are seeking a highly motivated research intern to conduct a foundational literature review for the major research project, "Project Governance and Governmentality as Collaborative Challenges." This project investigates how governance in major infrastructure projects can move beyond rigid contractual control to foster genuine collaboration. It explores how ‘governmentality’—the use of shared norms and discourse—can better align diverse internal project partners and external community stakeholders.
The intern will be responsible for systematically searching, critically analyzing, and synthesizing academic literature on key theoretical foundations of the project. This includes topics such as project governance and governmentality in the context of major infrastructure projects. The resulting review will identify current debates, theoretical frameworks, and research gaps, providing an essential foundation for the project's empirical and theoretical development.
Requirement to be on campus: No
Supervisor: Dr. Sujuan Zhang
Eligibility: WAM>75 and Undergraduate candidates must have already completed at least 96 credit points towards their undergraduate degree at the time of application.
Project Description:
This project explores how project-based approaches can be leveraged to accelerate and govern energy transitions, particularly within the context of net-zero policy targets. While energy transitions are often framed through national roadmaps and policy ambitions, their realisation depends on a complex web of projects—technological, infrastructural, institutional, and social.
The project aims to examine how the logics and tools of project management can be adapted to meet the challenges of decarbonisation, grid transformation, and just energy transitions. It investigates how projects are selected, scoped, sequenced, and governed in energy transition programs, and how they interact with broader political, regulatory, and community dynamics. Through case studies in the Australian context—especially in New South Wales—the project will identify critical tensions and coordination gaps between long-term energy policy and short-term project delivery.
By rethinking project governance in sociotechnical transitions, the project contributes to developing more adaptive, mission-oriented, and justice-sensitive approaches to managing the energy transition at scale.
Requirement to be on campus: Yes – preferred but flexible*dependent on government’s health advice
Supervisors: Dr Marloes Korendijk, A/Prof. Nader Naderpajouh
Eligibility:
Project Description:
This project investigates how multinational enterprises (MNEs) strategically adapt to climate change, with a focus on the role of CEO cognition. We are currently seeking a research assistant to support the data collection phase of the study. The role involves gathering and organizing data across four key dimensions: (1) country-level climate change exposure, (2) firm-level environmental adaptation, (3) annual reports and conference calls of the MNEs and (4) CEO-level information.
A particular focus will be on collecting and preparing CEO speech data from conference call transcripts for machine learning analysis of risk aversion and attention allocation. The ideal candidate will be detail-oriented, comfortable working with large datasets, and familiar with online databases and corporate disclosures. This is a critical stage of the project, and your work will directly contribute to understanding how firms perceive and respond to climate-related threats in a global context.
Requirement to be on campus: No
Supervisor: Dr Hoonyong Lee
Eligibility:
Required
Preferred
Project Description:
Wearable motion and biosensors have primarily been applied for workplace safety management to identify workers’ risky behaviors and delivering intervention messages through smartwatch alerts or mobile notifications. In practice, however, such messages are often ignored, resulting in limited behavioral change.
This project aims to improve workers’ acceptance of and responsiveness to safety messaging interventions through VR training. Withing the VR environment, participants navigate simulated construction sites containing slip, trip, and fall hazards. Upon encountering these hazards, they receive multimodal intervention messages, combining visual, auditory, and haptic cues, that prompt safer behavioral responses.
The study evaluates whether prior VR exposure strengthens the association between messaging interventions and behavioral change, thereby enhancing responsiveness to real-world messaging interventions.
Findings will provide empirical evidence on the role of VR training as a preparatory platform for safety interventions, contributing individual safety and fostering a stronger safety culture within the high-risk workplaces.
Requirement to be on campus: Yes *dependent on government’s health advice
Supervisor: Dr Jin Xue
Eligibility:
Project Description:
Are you a high-achieving Computer Science student looking to apply your skills to real-world challenges? Join a cutting-edge research project at the School of Project Management exploring how libraries, parks, churches, and mosques shape urban life. You’ll gain hands-on experience in data collection, from open-source tools and APIs (Google Maps, OpenStreetMap, social media platforms), cleaning, and processing the data for extracting valuable insights using advanced NLP methods.
You’ll sharpen your Python, data wrangling, and GIS skills while contributing to impactful research with real policy relevance. Ideal for students passionate about AI, data science, and urban analytics who want to build a strong portfolio and collaborate on meaningful academic work.
This is an excellent opportunity to turn data into insight and to see your code make a difference in how cities plan for communities.
Requirement to be on campus: Yes *dependent on government’s health advice
Supervisors: Dr Jin Xue
Eligibility:
Project Description:
Social procurement embeds community benefits into purchasing, which includes local jobs and apprenticeships, inclusive hiring, SME/social‑enterprise participation, and ethical supply chains. In construction project management, it turns projects as vehicles in fostering local development and social value generation.
This research builds a large‑language‑model and knowledge‑graph toolkit to map and analyse complex interactions among public clients, primes, subcontractors, social enterprises, and community actors across the project life cycle, with every insight traceable to source documents. Students will learn to work with large volumes of unstructured text data from project official documents, implementing RAG (e.g., LightRAG) and hybrid retrieval, extracting entities and relations, building stakeholder network graphs, and interpreting results.
Overall, the project will enhance student’s interdisciplinary capacity to link AI, project management, and social sustainability, preparing them for future roles in academia, government, or industry.
Requirement to be on campus: Yes *dependent on government’s health advice
Supervisor: Dr Jin Xue
Eligibility:
Project Description:
As public discourse increasingly shapes environmental policy, analysing social media has become vital for understanding environmental discourse that is vital to global sustainable outcomes.
This project investigates how environmental narratives are constructed and propagated on digital platforms, using social media data as a window into public values, conflicts, and sentiment dynamics. How can multi-modal AI models, especially large language models (LLMs), reveal patterns in environmental discourse and stakeholder salience?
The study will apply natural language processing and image-text alignment techniques to extract themes, sentiments, and influential voices from multi-platform social media data. Students will assist in data collection, fine-tuning LLMs, and discourse analysis.
Completion will empower students with hands-on expertise in social media data acquisition and AI analysis, linking theory to practice and cultivating interdisciplinary insights across data science, environmental management, and innovative technology.
Requirement to be on campus: Yes *dependent on government’s health advice
Supervisor: Dr Neda Mohammadi
Eligibility:
Project Description:
In changing systems, managers must choose whether to intervene, adapt, or let events run their course.
This project explores how a digital twin can embody such choices, showing how sustainability emerges not by a single decision, but by the sequence of choice and outcomes that follow and reshape the baseline. You will design a case study that builds a digital twin to simulate these decision points and their impact in practice.
You will develop scenarios where sustainability is tested by small disruptions and measured through responses. The final output will illustrate how digital twins capture this living cycle, offering decision-makers a lens into sustainability as a dynamic, evolving practice.
Requirement to be on campus: No
Supervisor: A/Prof. Ken Chung
Eligibiliy:
Distinction average. Desirable competencies: data analytics, mixed methods study, computing and quantitative analysis such as Python.
Project Description:
Community stakeholders now wield significant influence over projects through social media, where public sentiment—especially negative—can rapidly spread and even halt project progress. Misinformation and distrust are easily amplified, often outpacing the ability of project authorities to respond effectively. With the rise of AI-generated content, including synthetic voice, video, and deepfakes, the challenge of managing stakeholder perceptions has become more urgent and complex.
This research investigates how social media and AI technologies shape stakeholder engagement and influence project outcomes. It aims to understand the mechanisms behind the spread of distrust and misinformation, and to explore how project leaders can navigate this evolving landscape. The ultimate goal is to develop a strategic framework for managing digital stakeholder dynamics and to propose practical approaches for fostering trust, countering misinformation, and enhancing engagement in the age of AI.
Requirement to be on campus: No
Last updated 11th September 2025.
