Rivière named Association for Women in Mathematics fellow

CAAM professor recognized for her research, mentorship of women, and service.

Béatrice Rivière

Béatrice Rivière, the Noah G. Harding Chair and Professor of Computational and Applied Mathematics (CAAM) at Rice, has been named a fellow of the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM).

Rivière was recognized for her “contributions to numerical analysis, scientific computing and modeling of porous media; for her exemplary mentorship and supervision of women in applied and computational mathematics; and for her distinguished record of service and outreach.”

Rivière earned her Ph.D. in CAAM from the University of Texas at Austin in 2000. Before joining the Rice faculty in 2008, she served as an associate professor of mathematics at the University of Pittsburgh. She was promoted to full professor at Rice in 2013 and served as CAAM department chair from 2015 to 2018.

She has published more than 120 scholarly articles in numerical analysis and scientific computation. Her book on the theory and implementation of discontinuous Galerkin methods is highly cited and her research group is funded by the National Science Foundation, the oil and gas industry and the Gulf Coast Consortia for the Quantitative Biomedical Sciences.

Rivière has worked in the development and analysis of numerical methods applied to problems in porous media and in fluid mechanics. Her research focuses on development of high-order methods in time and in space for multiphase multicomponent flows (in rigid and deformable media); the modeling of pore scale flows for immiscible and partially miscible components; the numerical model of oxygen transport in a network of blood vessels; the analysis of neural networks for image segmentation and the design of iterative solvers.

Earlier this year, she was named a fellow of SIAM (Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics), the world's largest professional association devoted to applied mathematics. Riviere is an associate editor of the SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing, and of Results in Applied Mathematics, and a member of the editorial board for Advances in Water Resources. She is president of the SIAM TX-LA Section and was the former chair of the SIAM Activity Group on Geosciences.

Rivière is the director of Computational Modeling of Porous Media (COMP-M), which develops innovative numerical algorithms for use at the pore scale and at the Darcy scale. Porous media applications include energy, biomedicine and environment.

Rivière and 12 other newly elected fellows will be formally recognized at the AWM Reception and Awards Presentation on Jan. 7.