Sara Khalifa

Associate Professor Sara Khalifa is a faculty member in the School of Information Systems at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), within the Faculty of Science. Her research focuses on energy-efficient IoT systems, edge computing, and lightweight machine learning for resource-constrained devices. She pioneered foundational work in Energy Harvesting Sensing (EHS) during her tenure at CSIRO's Data61, enabling energy-positive sensing paradigms.

Education: PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from UNSW (2017), recipient of the prestigious John Makepeace Bennett Award for best dissertation in Australasia.

Research interests span ubiquitous sensing, machine learning for IoT, and sustainable energy harvesting technologies. Her work bridges theoretical advances with real-world applications such as speech emotion recognition and wearable health monitoring systems.

Awards:

• 2017 John Makepeace Bennett Award (CORE)
• 2017 NSW Mobility Innovation of the Year
• Merit R&D Award at APICTA (Asia Pacific ICT Alliance)

Her research has generated significant IP and attracted commercial interest. Current supervision topics include energy harvesting techniques for environmental monitoring systems.

Key contributions include developing self-powered IoT systems and energy-neutral activity recognition frameworks, advancing both theoretical foundations and practical implementations.