Explore By Supervisor

Route B: Supervisors and Topics for Open Call on Waste Futures

Below is a list of supervisors (and their research interests) who are accepting applications to the programme for 2027 entry.

You must contact them prior to making an application if you would like to work with them to ensure they support your application.

Name	School or Department at QMUL	Area(s) of Interest
Dr Andy Russell	Department of Geography and Environmental Science	Climate change risk assessment, climate change adaptation policy, environmental science and policy
Professor David Whyte	School of Law	1. Extractivism in the Sampi. A unified regulatory structure across the traditional lands of Sami peoples is accelerating the threat of toxic mining, largely for rare earth minerals to fuel the green economy. 2. Resisting and Resetting Toxic Lives at the Grassberg mine in West Papua, perhaps the most toxic single mine in the world. Although the source of their livelihoods has been destroyed (food, water, water transportation systems), people still find innovative ways of living & resisting.
Dr Meg Clinch	Wolfson Institute of Population Health	I would be open to supervising projects based rooted in social anthropology and science and technology studies that examined: the dynamics of public involvement in waste management and waste related policy making, the construction of knowledge about waste, toxicity and public health risk, the determinants of waste related health inequalities, mapping and understanding controversies related to waste making/disposal and health, and more than human approaches to living with waste. All projects would be committed to designing fair and sustainable future action through a commitment to transdisciplinary knowledge making and participatory action research.
Dr William Monteith	Department of Geography and Environmental Science	I would be interested in supervising projects exploring the relationship between waste and energy transitions. Focusing, for example on the social and material afterlives of renewable-energy infrastructures such as solar panels, batteries, wind turbines or electrolysers. And/or the question of ‘green’ wastes: how they are produced, where they go, and which places and communities inherit their environmental burdens. I would also welcome projects examining the changing relationships between waste, work and livelihoods, particularly in cities and communities in the Global South. Potential topics could explore informal and precarious forms of waste work; repair, reuse and recycling economies.
Dr Carlo Inverardi-Ferri	Department of Geography and Environmental Science	Carlo welcomes students wishing to study topics that fall within his research interests in the areas of political ecology and economic geography. Potential topics include but are not limited to formal and informal recycling economies; global waste and recycling networks; labour and livelihoods; waste landscapes, spaces and architectures; the relationship between waste, value and resource recovery; urban mining and circular economies; waste and the green transition. Carlo welcomes comparative and multi-sited projects, as well as projects combining ethnographic, participatory, visual and other qualitative approaches.
Dr Niranjana Ramesh	Department of Geography and Environmental Science	Urban & environmental geography; specifically coastal political ecology, pollution & toxicity in urban-agrarian geographies, coastal foodways. Imaginations of waste and value in littoral environments.
Dr Jeremy Schmidt	Department of Geography and Environmental Science	My expertise is in human dimensions of water and energy, particularly effects of oil spills and fossil fuel extraction on watersheds and responses by Indigenous communities to on-going extraction.
Professor John Iwan Jones	School of Biological and Behavioural Sciences	Ecology, impacts of contaminants, environmental management, biological assessment
Dr Edo Boek	School of Engineering and Material Sciences	We welcome student-led projects on converting carbon-rich and iron-rich wastes into recoverable materials for persistent pollutant remediation. Topics could include variable feedstock quality, adsorption and transport in soils, magnetic separation, regeneration and safe management of treatment residues. Projects may also examine when reuse reduces environmental impacts, who bears treatment costs, and how material choices affect access to remediation. Research questions can be co-developed with applicants and, where appropriate, practitioners or affected communities, connecting materials science and environmental engineering with geography or social sciences.
Dr Eleni Matechou	School of Mathematical Sciences	I develop statistical methods for incomplete and biased data, and could supervise projects applying them to waste. Possible areas include estimating waste that is never fully recorded, such as fly-tipping and illegal dumping, by combining official records, enforcement data and public reports with methods for hidden populations; using citizen science litter surveys to estimate how much litter is in the environment, where it comes from and how it responds to policies; and monitoring biodiversity on closed and restored landfill sites, and the effect of active sites on nearby habitats.
Dr Liz Storer	Department of Geography and Environmental Science	Health geography – particular focus on chronicity, toxicity, activism. Methods – ethnography, creative methods, participatory action research, critical policy ethnography. I have UK and East African experience.
Professor Jef Huysman	Department of Politics and International Relations	What imaginations of waste futures are shaping current debates about security in Europe, and how? This research theme contributes to research on how security concerns are transforming European regions, such as Sápmi (the land of the Sámi), border zones with Russia and its allies, and the Arctic. Rather than starting from security questions, the theme begins with imaginations of futures and asks how they are bearing on security policies and disputes in the present. Waste futures is an under-researched area in this field. Security here does not refer only to military defence and geopolitical relations between states, but to a broader conception of security that includes environmental, health, and cultural security.
Dr Mirko Palestrino	Department of Politics and International Relations	Potential areas are as follows: - Time & temporality - e.g. who's time matters, who's time is wasted, and institutionalised/collective decisions around these issues as a technology of governance/social hierarchisation - Weaponisation of waste - as a theoretical issue, in a specific conflict, etc. - Military and war waste - the 'greening the military' agenda, the military and environmental pollution, etc. - The International Political Sociologies of Waste/Waste Governance - e.g. what transnational links exists in and around waste management, which picture of the international do get back when we centre waste/waste management, what actors are involved and why?
Professor Paul Heritage	School of the Arts, Department of Drama	Socially-applied arts; arts and public health (with focus on mental health); queer performance; Brazilian culture; indigenous cultural exchange and the climate crisis; arts and culture evaluation; art-based research practices
Professor Kiera Vaclavik	School of the Arts, Department of Languages, Linguistics and Film	I would be interested in supervising projects artistic and pop culture depictions, and deployments, of waste landscapes. I'm also interested in the ways in which specific marginalized groups (e.g. children) have been encouraged to encounter and conceptualise waste.
Dr Stuart Grieve	Department of Geography and Environmental Science	Remote sensing, landscape change, sediment transport, machine learning, plastic waste
Professor Gemma Harvey	Department of Geography and Environmental Science	Biogeomorphology, environmental restoration, rewilding
Dr Ray Ward	Department of Geography and Environmental Science	Dr Raymond Ward is open to supervising interdisciplinary PhD projects investigating the sources, transport, fate and ecological impacts of pollution and waste in coastal and marine ecosystems. Potential topics include the impacts of marine plastics, microplastics, chemical and human waste contaminants and legacy waste on coastal habitats, marine biodiversity, ecosystem functioning and blue carbon storage. I would welcome projects exploring how pollution interacts with climate change and other environmental pressures to influence ecosystem resilience, and how nature-based solutions and ecological restoration can mitigate these impacts. I am particularly interested in projects combining fieldwork, biogeochemical and ecological analyses, geospatial modelling, remote sensing and AI to monitor pollution, assess environmental risks and inform evidence-based waste management and coastal restoration strategies. These projects could also explore how research can support more sustainable waste management and marine conservation policies, working collaboratively with communities, NGOs, industry and policymakers.
Professor Patrick Diamond	Department of Politics and International Relations	Public policy; governance.
Professor Kathryn Yusoff	Department of Geography and Environmental Science	reparations and waste, mining, waste as extraction, decolonial architectures of waste
Professor Ana Jorge Sobrido	School of Engineering and Material Sciences	One PhD project I have in mind I would like to explore through an open call would be also around textile waste, but from a more multidisciplinary angle. Potential title could be "From Clothing to Batteries: Textile Waste, Reuse and the Changing Value of Discarded Garments". My idea would be to explore on one hand how can we extend the social and material value of clothing and convert textiles that can no longer be reused into effective energy materials. Also, does knowing that old clothing can become something useful encourage responsible collection, or make people more comfortable discarding it earlier?
Dr Zhe Li	School of Engineering and Material Sciences	We welcome proposals addressing the future of waste arising from emerging technologies and advanced materials. Topics may include sustainable semiconductors and electronics, circular design of photovoltaic and energy technologies, environmental/ecological impacts of novel materials, electronic waste management, critical material recovery, waste-to-resource technologies, life-cycle assessment, environmental monitoring, and safe-and-sustainable-by-design approaches. Projects may investigate how decisions made during material development, device engineering, manufacturing, use, and disposal shape future waste streams and environmental outcomes, contributing to more circular, resilient, and sustainable technological systems.
Dr Caterina Gennaioli	School of Business and Management	I would welcome proposals on how future waste flows, regulation and disposal practices may change who lives with waste and who benefits from its recovery. Possible topics include the role of political influence in siting informal dumps, unequal exposure among disadvantaged communities, the effects of waste imports, and whether domestic or overseas regulation reduces harm or shifts it elsewhere. Applicants could use satellite mapping, quantitative analysis or field research. Ghana is one possible setting; the country and waste stream could be shaped by the applicant’s interests and feasible data.
Professor Paul Balcombe	School of Engineering and Material Sciences	* Measuring and predictive modelling of future methane emissions from data centres * Reducing emissions from the future shipping fleet: fuels, exhaust treatment, regulation
Dr Saejune Park	School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science	Title: Advanced filtration and microfluidic systems for high-frequency aquatic waste sensors Brief description: Developing integrated microfluidic channels and filtration mechanisms to enable continuous dielectric analysis of complex waters such as landfill leachate and river runoff.
Professor Andrew Mendelsohn	Department of History	Past, present, futures of waste science Roads taken or not: How have the sciences developed in relation to perceived problems of waste? Focus could be on e.g. microbiology, materials science, data science, engineering, social or environmental sciences in 20th-21st centuries. How have fields defined problems, created interdisciplinarity or not, developed methods, interacted with government, publics, education? Projects could examine evolving and contested concepts and practices – ‘waste’, pollution, ‘biodegradable’, cycle and recycling, safety and risk. Co-supervision could be within the humanities & social sciences or involve colleagues in fields (natural sciences, engineering, law, management) where such concepts & practices are in use.
Dr Salvatore Grasso	School of Engineering and Material Sciences	Dr Grasso welcomes proposals in: energy-efficient electrothermal and field-assisted technologies for remediating legacy contaminated soils; solar-powered off-grid processing units built from end-of-life photovoltaic panels for orphaned sites; flash Joule heating for critical raw material recovery from electronic and photovoltaic waste; cold sintering and reactive mineralisation for encapsulating fluorinated or hazardous residues; field-assisted processing to upcycle industrial by-products into functional ceramics; and non-monetary finance models for orphaned contaminated land. Projects may integrate materials science, environmental engineering, geography, and social science.
Dr Kasia Mika-Bresolin	School of the Arts, Department of Languages, Linguistics and Film	Kasia welcomes projects in postcolonial environmental and medical humanities, especially in relation to questions of long-term harms, coloniality, and repair.  Long inspired by Caribbean thinkers, Kasia’s research and linguistic expertise (incl. French, Polish, Italian, German) allow her to supervise projects across a range of languages and contexts. She welcomes interdisciplinary proposals drawing on the humanities, field-based disciplines, visual methods, among others. She is particularly interested in: representations and imaginaries of futures and potential repair within wasted landscapes, fossil fuels and their afterlives (beyond the ‘Global North’); toxicity and pollution; projects connecting environmental and medical humanities.
Professor Matteo Palma	School of Physical and Chemical Sciences	Projects on turning waste into value and making its hazards visible, using chemistry, nanomaterials and computation. Examples: (1) splitting methane and other waste gases into hydrogen on solid carbon materials such as graphene and carbon nanotubes; (2) low-cost nanowire sensors for landfill and industrial gases; (3) CO2 mineralisation to make valuable materials from waste; (4) machine-learned atomic models to screen materials that capture, sense or convert waste gases. Applicants from chemistry, materials, physics or engineering are welcome.
Dr Andrew Smith	Department of History	Contemporary French History and Politics
Professor Jonathan Grigg	Blizard Institute, Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry+C36	Jonathan is the UK’s leading paediatrician on adverse effects of air pollution. He has published many studies of effect of particulate matter (PM) in i) cultured cells, ii) airway cells obtained by brushings and induced sputum,  iii) epidemiological studies, and iv) personal measurements. He developed the use of carbonaceous PM loading of airway macrophages as a biomarker of inhaled lung dose,  a method now in global use. He has applied this methodology to identify fossil-fuel particles in human placental phagocytes. Recently he identified how inhaled PM are transported in the bloodstream. In many mechanistic studies, he has shown that inhaled toxins increase susceptibility of airway epithelial cells to bacterial and viral infection. Other studies have focussed on the effect of PM from other sources including the London Underground. In clinical studies, has shown impaired removal of inhaled PM by airway macrophages in children with respiratory diseases, and recently, has focussed on effects of PM air pollution on the placenta and fetus, and as a member of the UK RESPIRE consortium is currently assessing effects of PM on placental macrophages. Clinically he is an international expert in the treatment of wheeze in children and has led many independent clinical trials.
Professor Alison Blunt	Department of Geography and Environmental Science	I'm interested in supervising projects on domestic waste futures.
Dr Joanne Yao	Department of Politics and International Relations	Potential areas for research: international environmental governance through multilateral treaties and the United Nations system; diplomatic negotiations and waste; environmental history and the legacies of colonialism; imagined wastelands and their importance in international politics.
Professor Miri Rubin	Department of History	Medieval and Early Modern Urban History and Religious Cultures
Professor Philippa Williams	Department of Geography and Environmental Science	I'm interested in supervising projects on digital waste futures.
Dr Ahmed Ismail	School of Engineering and Materials Science	Environmental Sensing and Water treatment Access to clean water is essential for public health and environmental sustainability. However, growing levels of contaminants—including pharmaceuticals, dyes, pesticides, heavy metals, and industrial chemicals—are placing increasing pressure on global water resources. Existing treatment technologies such as UV disinfection, activated carbon adsorption, membrane filtration, and chemical oxidation have limitations in efficiency, cost, and contaminant detection. Current technologies generally remove pollutants or detect them, but rarely perform both simultaneously. We seek to address these challenges through a multifunctional nanomaterial platform combining contaminant sensing and water remediation.
Dr Sianne Gordon-Wilson	Queen Mary Business School	Consumer behaviour and the future of waste: Research exploring the consumer-side causes and consequences of waste, including why consumers acquire, retain, replace, repair, reuse, recycle or dispose of electronic, fashion, packaging, or food waste . Communicating waste and sustainability: Research examining how sustainability and waste-related information is communicated to consumers and how different forms of messaging influence perceptions, attitudes and behaviour. This could include communication about product materials, environmental impacts, recycling and disposal. Consumer responses across life stages: Research examining how age, life stage, values, identity and changing circumstances shape waste-related behaviours.
Dr Ben Neimark	Queen Mary Business School	Human geographer and political ecologist whose current research looks at the US military as a global climate actor and, more broadly, the environment footprints of the world’s militaries. Leads a new UKRI grant on military critical mineral supply chains and decarbonisation - which uses a geopolitical ecology lens to examine the critical geopolitical and political economy of large institutions, such as militaries, and their role in multi-scalar environment and climate breakdown.
Professor Oliver Fenwick	School of Engineering and Material Sciences	Area of research topic: Converting waste heat into electricity with up-cycled materials Brief summary: This project would involve making electronic devices that convert waste heat into electricity (ionic thermoelectric generators). Current thermoelectric generators are made from toxic and scarce elements. This project will develop thermoelectric generators where the main parts, the electrodes and the electrolyte, are made from abundant and safe materials that are derived from bio-waste. The aim is to create new material valorisation pathways whilst also using waste heat as a resource to produce electrical energy.
Dr Maria Crespo Ribadeneyra	School of Engineering and Materials Science	I would be interested in supervising a PhD student through the open call. My proposed project already aligns strongly with this year's 'Waste Futures' theme by exploring how emerging Na-ion battery technologies may generate future waste streams and how these can be anticipated and managed through circular economy approaches. Specifically, the research will examine the production, reuse and recycling of next-generation sodium-ion battery materials, including high-capacity tin-based anodes, before these technologies are deployed at large scale.
Dr Colin Crick	School of Engineering and Materials Science	Bio-Derived Barrier Coatings: Creating functional water- and oil-resistant paper packaging from renewable materials (e.g., bio-waxes and biopolymers) to replace single-use plastics and harmful synthetic chemicals. Universal Waste Compatibility: Designing coatings engineered to integrate safely into existing industrial recycling, composting, or energy-from-waste processing streams. Functional Surfaces for Environmental Challenges: Developing bio-inspired, superhydrophobic, or functional surface chemistry for sustainable material protection and separation. Life-Cycle & Policy Integration: Evaluating material innovations using life-cycle assessment (LCA), environmental policy, and economic analysis.
Dr Dimitrios Papageorgiou	School of Engineering and Materials Science	I would be interested in supervising a PhD student through the open call under the Waste Futures theme. Potential areas include: - Circular design of biodegradable functional materials. - Converting food, agricultural, textile or industrial waste into high-value materials. - Sustainable sensors for pollution and environmental exposure. - Materials for reducing the impact of contaminated water, soils and leachates. - Packaging materials with controlled lifetime and reduced persistence. - Polymer composites designed for repair, reuse, disassembly or recovery. - Sustainable materials for low-power devices or environmental monitoring. - How waste environments alter material performance, degradation and fate.
Dr Eleanor Godwin	School of Law	My supervisory interests would encompass socio-legal and interdisciplinary research examining the governance, regulation and unequal consequences of waste and pollution, particularly where environmental harms persist across generations. Potential projects could explore toxic and chemical waste, including PFAS and other persistent pollutants; legacy pollution and contaminated environments; corporate and state responsibility for waste; environmental injustice and unequal exposure to pollution; and the role of law and regulation in shaping future waste landscapes.
Professor Mark Trimmer	School of Biological and Behavioural Sciences	"I am interested in how human activity, be it through pollution, habitat degradation or climate change, alters the natural cycling of the elements that sustain life on Earth with a particular interest in greenhouse gas balances and novel microbial interactions and processes" Some more technical details - I use isotope tracers and sensors with mass spectrometry and gas chromatography to understand the flux of elements in aquatic ecosystems, from headwater streams out to the open ocean, and marry these approaches with molecular techniques to look into the underlying microbial communities driving that flux.

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