Rate My Professor Hannah Lomas

Post-PhD, Lomas joined the Nanostructured Interfaces and Materials group led by Professor Frank Caruso at the University of Melbourne's Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering as a Research Fellow from November 2009 to March 2011. There, she published as lead author "Polymersome-Loaded Capsules for Controlled Release of DNA" in Small and three review articles on nanoengineering polymeric assemblies. In May 2011, she was awarded the John Stocker Postdoctoral Fellowship from the CSIRO Science and Industry Endowment Fund for research on chlorine-resistant coatings for seawater desalination and secured a University of Melbourne Early Career Researcher grant worth approximately $19,000. Since July 2013, she has worked at the University of Newcastle, progressing from Research Assistant (2013-2014) and Research Associate in the Faculty of Engineering and Built Environment (2014-2017) to her current role. Her research specializations include coal and cokemaking, coke strength, fractography, metallurgical coke, and tribology, spanning resources engineering and extractive metallurgy, tribology, and composite and hybrid materials. Lomas has led multiple Australian Coal Association Research Program grants totaling over $2 million, such as "Abrasion Resistance of Coke Under Hydrogen Reduction Blast Furnace Conditions" ($159,416, 2023-2024) and "Factors Underpinning the Reactivity of Coke RMDC and IMDC" ($171,436, 2022-2023). Key publications feature "Tribological Testing of Metallurgical Coke: Coefficient of Friction and Abrasion Resistance" in Energy & Fuels (2018), "Influence of elevated temperature and gas atmosphere on coke abrasion resistance" in Fuel (2024), and "Gasification and degradation mechanism of metallurgical coke" (2025). She co-supervised a PhD on coke reactivity in hydrogen-enriched blast furnace conditions, completed in 2025, and has delivered presentations at conferences like the International Conference on Sustainable Cokemaking and Ironmaking (ICSCI 2025).