Irene Fonseca

Irene Maria Quintanilha Coelho da Fonseca is a Portuguese-American applied mathematician, the Mellon College of Science Professor of Mathematics at Carnegie Mellon University, where she directs the Center for Nonlinear Analysis.

Fonseca was born in Portugal, and did her undergraduate studies at the University of Lisbon. She earned a Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1985, under the supervision of David Kinderlehrer, who later followed his student to CMU. She joined the CMU faculty after postdoctoral studies in Paris, France.

In 2011, Fonseca was elected president of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.

Fonseca is the co-author of:

• Degree Theory in Analysis and Applications (with Wilfrid Gangbo, Oxford University Press, 1995)
• Modern Methods in the Calculus of Variations: LP Spaces (with Giovanni Leoni, Springer Verlag, 2007)

Fonseca is a knight of the Order of Saint James of the Sword.

In 2009, Fonseca was elected as a fellow of SIAM "for contributions to nonlinear partial differential equations and the calculus of variations". In 2012 she became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

Fonseca is married to stem cell researcher Gerald Schatten.