Antoinette Tordesillas is a Professor in the School of Mathematics and Statistics and the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Melbourne.
Her research crosses the domains of mathematics, engineering, physics and geophysics. She has been chief investigator on a range of problems relating to: off-road vehicle and robot mobility in terrestrial & extraterrestrial environments, biostructures, geotechnical structures, sensor networks, earthquake and landslide mechanics, and design of sustainable construction materials.

These efforts involve international collaborations with multidisciplinary teams from the experimental and high-performance computing fronts, with funding from the US Air Force, US Army, NASA, Australian Research Council, Hong Kong Research Grants Council, the British Council, and the Australian Academy of Science. She holds two patents: one on comminution and dewatering in granular materials and another on early prediction of landslides. She currently leads two programs.
The first, under the US DoD High Performance Computing Modernization Program, is aimed “Towards Designing Complex Networks Resilient to Stealthy Attack and Cascading Failure”.
The second, in collaboration with the University of Florence, UNESCO and an industry partner, fuses data analytics and granular media failure dynamics to analyze remote sensing radar data for landslide hazard risk assessment.

This research seeks to advance early warning systems (EWS) for landslide-prone areas around the world, including parts of Italy (Stromboli), China, New Zealand and Australia – with the latter focused on the areas devastated by the recent Australia’s bushfire crisis.