The last place you would think of finding a potential postgraduate student to study the behaviour of sharks would be in Germany.
But for Vera Schluessel a unique PhD program at The University of Queensland is allowing her to do just that.
Ms Schluessel, from Bonn in Germany, is the first participant in UQ’s Doctor of Philosophy Program in International Collaborative Mode that allows international students to study both here and at home.
“This was the perfect opportunity to do research that I really wanted to do as well as to do some travelling and gain different experiences,” Ms Schluessel said.
Working with Associate Professor Shaun Collin, the Director of the Neuroscience Program in UQ’s School of Biomedical Sciences, Ms Schluessel is studying the sensory behaviour of sharks and rays.
Associate Professor Collin said his lab was looking at the sensory biology of bull sharks and a number of other elasmobranchs in Moreton Bay to investigate what environmental factors guide their movement and migration patterns.
“By bringing together basic science of the sense organs of these large predators and the more applied fields of remote sensing and telemetry we hope to draw useful conclusions about the behaviour of elasmobranchs in the Bay and make predictions about where they feed, migrate and even reproduce,” Associate Professor Collin said.
“Little is known about shark behaviour and as such they are severely threatened from over-exploitation,” Ms Schluessel said.
“Any information about their general biology and development can help protect them and potentially their environment.”
Prior to coming to UQ, Vera was studying fresh water rays and their spatial orientation and memory at the University of Bonn.
The sharing part of Ms Schluessel’s studies will see her do field and laboratory-based research at UQ for 2 1/2 years and about one year back in Bonn doing part of the analysis and some components of the research while drawing upon expertise available in Germany in the lab of Professor Horst Bleckmann.
“They have a very good set up in Bonn for morphological and physiological analysis but here I can get the field experience of going out and observing the behaviour of these sharks up close” Ms Schluessel said.
As a student in the new program, Ms Schluessel had her UQ tuition fees reduced by half and she also received a DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service – one of the world’s largest exchange organisations) postgraduate scholarship providing the remaining tuition costs, a living allowance, travel and insurance.
UQ’s Dean of Postgraduate Students, Professor Alan Lawson, said this new approach to PhDs would extend the options and experience of international students wanting to study at UQ.
“It was increasingly clear that the old models for international students doing a research higher degree at UQ needed serious renovation,” Professor Lawson said.
“UQ has innumerable international research linkages through research groups and individual researchers who, as a normal part of their research activity, make connections and engage in collaborations with international colleagues.
“These research partnerships can sometimes provide an ideal base for a PhD project that builds on the complementarity of the research strengths of both institutions.
“This program can therefore support a supervised research project that is more innovative than could be carried out at either institution alone.”
He said another advantage of the program was as international postgraduate students were often older and more experienced than average, they usually had work or family responsibilities which made it harder to go overseas for a full three to four years, the time it normally takes to complete a PhD.
Media: For more information contact Professor Alan Lawson (telephone 07 3365 3477), Associate Professor Shaun Collin (telephone 07 3365 4066) or Andrew Dunne at UQ Communications (telephone 07 3365 2802).
