Rate My Professor Geoffrey Brooks

Professor Geoffrey Brooks is Professor of Sustainable Mineral Processing in the School of Engineering at Swinburne University of Technology, where he holds the Swinburne-CSIRO Chair in Sustainable Mineral Processing. He earned a B.Eng. in Chemical Engineering from RMIT University in 1983, a B.A. in History and Philosophy of Science and Media from Swinburne University of Technology in 1989, and a PhD in Pyrometallurgy from the University of Melbourne in 1994. After completing his PhD, he was Associate Professor in the Department of Materials Engineering at the University of Wollongong from 1993 to 2000. He held senior positions at McMaster University in Canada and as Senior Principal Research Scientist at CSIRO Minerals from 2004 to 2006 before joining Swinburne in 2006 as Professor of Engineering. Brooks leads the Extraterrestrial Resource Processing program in Swinburne's Space Technology and Industry Institute, heads the Extra-Terrestrial Materials Processing group, and serves as a Program Leader in the ARC Steel Innovation Hub.

His research focuses on process metallurgy, including fundamental aspects of metal production and refining, kinetic models of oxygen steelmaking, alternative ironmaking processes, solar thermal processing, e-waste treatment, lunar materials processing, sensor development, and aluminum production. He has published over 250 papers on steelmaking, aluminium, and metals production, with key contributions such as 'Modeling of trajectory and residence time of metal droplets in slag-metal-gas emulsions in oxygen steelmaking' (2005), 'Dynamic Model of Basic Oxygen Steelmaking Process Based on Multi-zone Reaction Kinetics: Model Derivation and Validation' (2018), 'Droplet Heat Transfer in Oxygen Steelmaking' (2021), 'Hydrogen Plasma for Low-Carbon Extractive Metallurgy: Oxides Reduction, Metals Refining, and Wastes Processing' (2024), and 'Mechanism and Kinetics of PbO–SiO2–CaO Slag Reduction Using Hydrogen' (2025). A Fellow of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (FIMMM), Brooks has received the John Elliott Lectureship from AIST (2013), the Distinguished Lecture Award from TMS (2018), the Bessemer Gold Medal (2023) for contributions to steelmaking kinetics and education, and the Marcus Grossman Award for Best Paper (2015).