The U.S. Association for Computational Mechanics Creates an Award Honoring Mary Wheeler

The U.S. Association for Computational Mechanics has established the Mary F. Wheeler Medal, in recognition of her outstanding and sustained contributions to interdisciplinary and emerging areas including earth, environmental, and energy sciences. The first award will be made in 2025.

Dr. Wheeler holds the Ernest and Virginia Cockrell Chair of Engineering and is director of the Center for Subsurface Modeling at the Oden Institute for Computational Engineering and Science at the University of Texas at Austin. She is also a professor of both aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics and petroleum and geosystems engineering.

Narayana Aluru, the current president of U.S. Association for Computational Mechanics, stated that “Wheeler’s path-breaking and sustained contributions to computational methods and their application to emerging interdisciplinary areas have stood out in the computational mechanics community for many decades now. USACM is privileged and deeply honored to create the Mary F. Wheeler Medal in recognition of her numerous outstanding contributions to the science and engineering community.”

“This is really incredibly special to have a medal named after me. I almost feel inadequate, it is really something very special. I am both flattered and humbled in the enormous presence of great researchers. It couldn’t have happened at a better time for me,” said Professor Wheeler, who is recovering from hip surgery.

Wheeler is a graduate of the University of Texas, where she was a double major in social sciences and mathematics, She holds a master’s degree in mathematics from the University of Texas and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Rice University in Houston. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Texas in 1995, she was the first woman named to hold the Noah Harding Professor of Computational and Applied Mathematics at Rice University.