Juan Mario Restrepo

Juan Mario Restrepo (born 4 September 1961) is an American mathematician recognized for his contributions to ocean dynamics, data assimilation, and computational statistical mechanics.
In ocean dynamics Restrepo is best known for his work in Wave–current interaction, and in particular, on the wind-driven ocean circulation . He pioneered the use of stochastic processes to capture wave breaking dissipation . Largely unexplored, he provided fundamental understanding of transient wave transport . He predicted the phenomenon of 'sticky waters' in nearshore waters: the parking of shoreward propagating pollutants and debris in coastal waters, the result of the transition of advective to diffusive transport in the nearshore. In the context of climate science, he has focused on climate predictability 
Largely addressing issues of climate prediction, his mathematical work has focused on Bayesian estimation of time dependent model and observation in the presence of uncertainties. Restrepo has distinguished himself for creating new estimation methods, capable of handling nonlinear/non-Gaussian problems, by the application statistical physics: novel uses of the relative entropy , path integrals , geometric constraints , Bayesian future predictions in wave phenomena . 
==Career==
Juan M. Restrepo is the Section Head of the Mathematics in Computation Section at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He is also Joint Faculty Professor in the Mathematics Department at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Prior to that, he was in the mathematics department at Oregon State University, and in the mathematics and physics departments at The University of Arizona. He began his career as a postdoctoral fellow at Argonne National Laboratory and a visiting professor in the mathematics department at UCLA. 
Restrepo grew up in New Jersey/New York, and in Bogota Colombia, he is the son of the Colombian artist Pedro Restrepo and the Italian/Armenian Pianist and TV Producer Ilda Pace Restrepo. He holds a Music BS from New York University, an MS in Engineering Acoustics from the Pennsylvania State University and a PhD in Physics from the Pennsylvania State University. Under the supervision of Jerry L. Bona and T. Brooke Benjamin, he worked on mathematical aspects of solitary waves and the dynamics of sediment under the action of nonlinear dispersive waves. As a post-doctoral fellow he did research in wavelet-Galerkin methods, back-propagation for differentiation. With Sever Tipei and Hans Kaper, he created the first ever music on a parallel computer, the IBM Scalable POWERparallel computer, and designed the acoustics of the Advanced Photon Source Auditorium at Argonne National Laboratory.
He has served as vice chair of Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Geosciences Section, chair of the American Physical Society Focus Group on Climate, President of the Nonlinear Geophysics Section at American Geophysical Union, and many committee assignments in SIAM. He is an associate editor at the International Journal of Uncertainty Quantification, Nonlinear Processes in Geophysics, and Foundations of Data Sciences.
==Recognition==
Restrepo's awards include the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), Geosciences Career Prize 2017, and a Department of Energy Young Investigator Award, 2003. He is a fellow of SIAM, and a fellow of the American Physical Society.
Category:1961 births
Category:People from Bogotá
Category:American people
Category:American mathematicians