February 18, 2013
Mary Wheeler has been selected to receive the Honorary Membership Award of the International Society for Porous Media, InterPore. The award is given in recognition of her achievements in the area of subsurface flow and contaminant transport, and in recognition of her great contribution in increasing the visibility, credibility and prestige of porous media research.
The Honorary Membership Award is reserved for individuals who have made extraordinary contributions to porous media science and technology, who are world renowned in the porous media community, and whose contributions are consistent with the aims and ideals of InterPore. This award is given to only one individual per year.
The nominating letter acknowledged Dr. Wheeler as a renowned computational mathematician as well as an outstanding interdisciplinary researcher. “She has tirelessly and successfully worked to bring cutting-edge computational techniques to porous media applications as well as bring challenges of porous media modeling to computational mathematics. Her contribution on bridging computational mathematics and porous media area is tremendous. Thanks to her efforts and her leadership, many advanced numerical techniques have been developed and applied in porous media applications. Many of these methods and techniques are particularly tailored to solve difficult problems in porous media and address the shortcomings of many existing methods.”
The award also recognized Wheeler’s work on many aspects of computational subsurface - analysis, development, and applications - and her involvement in the development of many advanced numerical techniques. “She has been a strong proponent of applying advanced numerical techniques to simulation of complex subsurface processes in heterogeneous media and mapping these simulations onto today’s computer architectures. She has created and led one of the leading consortiums on subsurface modeling at the University of Texas at Austin. The center is supported by a number of companies and has been very active in technology transfer. In this center, Dr. Wheeler has trained many excellent students and postdocs.”
Nominating materials also noted Dr. Wheeler's contributions include development and analysis of mixed finite element methods, discontinuous Galerkin techniques, efficient solvers for multi-phase flow and transport, aposteriori error estimates, multiscale simulation techniques, efficient Ensemble Kalman Filters, multi-phase flow and transport modeling techniques.
