| Doreen Anne Thomas | |
| Occupation: | Professor of Mechanical Engineering |
| Employer: | University of Melbourne |
Doreen Anne Thomas is a mathematician and electrical and mechanical engineer.[1] She is an emeritus professor of Mechanical Engineering at Melbourne University[2] and director of the start-up company MineOptima.[3]
Thomas earned her BSc from the University of Cape Town, and another from the University of Witwatersrand. At Oxford she earned an MSc and a D.Phil in 1976, with a mathematical dissertation entitled Problems in Functional Analysis supervised by Hilary Priestley. Her mathematical in network analysis work led to her contributions in electrical and mechanical engineering.
As professor in the many engineering schools, in mathematics and statistics and as associate dean of research and research training at Melbourne she has done much to encourage women to be engineers. The engineering faculty of Melbourne University honours her work by offering postdoctoral scholarships in her name.[4] [5] [6] In 2006 she as appointed as the University of Melbourne's first female professor of Engineering. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering and a Fellow of Engineers Australia.[7] She also has over 150 publications in international peer reviewed journals and conference proceedings.
She commercialised her mining software optimising mine design via her start-up company MineOptima which was acquired by the mining software company RPM.[8] This software, which reduces development time and haulage costs in underground tunnel design, has been licensed to some of the world’s largest mining companies.