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In 2000, Dr Antoinette Tordesillas was awarded the J H Michell Medal by the Australia and New Zealand Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ANZIAM) Society for "distinguished research in applied and/or industrial mathematics for an outstanding new researcher under 35". Antoinette received her science degree from Adelaide University majoring in applied mathematics and physical and inorganic chemistry. She was first introduced to industrial and applied mathematics through her honours year project which involved the development of a model of the hot-dip galvanizing process for sheet metal. This resulted in her being awarded a joint BHP Steel and University of Wollongong industrial engineering postgraduate scholarship to conduct research on the roller coating process, the coating procedure used in the manufacture of COLORBOND steel (a high quality pre-coated sheet metal sold worldwide and found in nearly every Australian home!). At the fundamental level, this project entailed the use, as well as the development of new techniques in Contact Mechanics, a sub-discipline of Solid Mechanics that is devoted to the study of interaction between deformable solids. A highlight of her PhD research was her visit, as a British Council Scholar, to the two leading research centres in this area: the Department of Theoretical Mechanics at the University of Nottingham and the Tribology Centre at Cambridge University. Following her PhD, Antoinette held teaching and research appointments in the USA, first at the University of Colorado-Boulder and then at Kansas State University. In 1996, she returned to Australia to take up an academic appointment at the University of Melbourne. Her research program currently encompasses:
(a) A US Army funded program on soil-tyre interaction which has attracted the interest of Australian and overseas road authorities. Her findings could help reduce costly prototype vehicle field testing, provide a more accurate 'feel' for trainee drivers in virtual reality simulators and lead to 'greener' guidelines for off-road driving. She was an invited contributor to the panel discussion on "How to Face the 21st Century?" at the 13th International Conference of the International Society For Terrain Vehicle Systems held in Munich in 2000.
(b) A study of the mechanics of powders, sand and other granular media for which she has received several awards and grants including those from the US Army Research Office, the Australian Research Council and the Australian Academy of Science. The goal of this research is a reliable mathematical model that will run well on readily accessible computers. Her recent work on multiscale modelling has been recognised internationally via lecture invitations to international conferences including the 2006 Gordon Research conference, Powders and Grains 05, NASA Inaugural Workshop on Granular Materials in Lunar and Martian Explorations 05, International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics 03, and the 2003 International Conference on Scientific Computation and Differential Equations. She has been an invited researcher at the Geotechnical and Structures Laboratory of the US Army Corps of Engineers, the NASA-John F. Kennedy Space Center, and at the Centre for Nonlinear and Complex Systems at Duke University.
Antoinette is very active in the advancement and promotion of mathematics and mechanics. She was recently appointed to the Australian Academy of Science, National Committee for the Mechanical Sciences. She is the co-founder of Real-world Maths in Action!, a bi-annual maths fair for Year 11-12 students and teachers. She serves on the Editorial Board of The ANZIAM Journal. She has served on the National Executive Committee of ANZIAM (1999-2000), and the Executive Committee of the Victoria Branch of ANZIAM as Chair from 2002-2004.