In Memoriam: Ilinca Stanciulescu-Panea, 1972-2021

Ilinca Stanciulescu-Panea, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Rice University in Houston, Texas, died at a friend’s home in Washington State on February 28. She was 49 years old and had suffered from cancer.

Dr. Stanciulescu-Panea was a native of Bucharest, Romania. She joined the Rice University faculty in 2009. The courses she taught at Rice include Nonlinear Finite Element Method Analysis; Advanced Mechanics of Materials; and Elasticity, Plasticity, and Damage Mechanics. She also conducted research on computational mechanics (nonlinear finite elements), constitutive modeling of materials, multiscale and multiphysics formulations, nonlinear dynamics, and stability of complex systems.

Prior to joining Rice, Dr. Stanciulescu-Panea served as an assistant professor in the civil and environmental engineering department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She conducted postdoctoral research in the  Computational Mechanics Laboratory at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

Dr. Stanciulescu-Panea earned a bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics at Bucharest University. She held a second bachelor’s degree in structural engineering and a master’s degree in advanced methods in structural analysis from the Technical University of Civil Engineering in Bucharest. Dr. Stanciulescu-Panea recceived a Ph.D. in civil engineering at Duke University.