Biography on irene fonseca

Irene Maria Quintanilha Coelho Da Fonseca was born in Lisbon, Portugal, on July 10, 1956. She received her Licenciatura in Mathematics at the University of Lisbon in July 1980. With the assistance of a Fulbright travel fellowship and a Gulbenkian fellowship, she came to the United States to study mathematics at the University of Minnesota, where her brother-in-law was also pursuing his PhD in mathematics. Fonseca earned her Master of Science degree from Minnesota in 1983 and her PhD in 1985. Her thesis was on Variational Methods for Elastic Crystals, written under the supervision of David Kinderlehrer [abstract]. Parts of this thesis were published in the Archive for Rational Mechanics and Analysis (vol. 97, no. 3, 1987, pp189-220.)

From 1985 to 1987 Fonseca held a Postdoctoral position in Paris VI (Paris, France) and at the École Polytechnique (Palaiseau, France). She then came back to the United States as an assistant professor of mathematics at Carnegie Mel