Juan Mario Restrepo
Juan Mario Restrepo (born September 4, 1961) is an American mathematician known for work in ocean dynamics, data assimilation, and computational statistics. He helped develop methods to model how waves interact with currents, used randomness to describe how wave breaking dissipates energy, and explained how water and waves move near shore. He also predicted "sticky waters" and studied how sand ridges form on the continental shelf. He is the son of Colombian artist Pedro Restrepo.
Education: Restrepo studied music at New York University, then electrical engineering at Columbia University. He earned a master's in engineering acoustics at Penn State in 1987 and a PhD in physics from Penn State in 1992. His PhD thesis, supervised by Jerry L. Bona, was on the formation and evolution of longshore sand ridges.
Career: After postdoctoral work at Argonne National Laboratory and UCLA, he joined the University of Arizona as an assistant professor in 1997 and became a full professor in 2009, with joint appointments in physics and atmospheric science. From 2014 to 2020 he was a mathematics professor at Oregon State University with ties to statistics and oceans/atmospheres. In 2020 he moved to Oak Ridge National Laboratory as Distinguished Member of the R&D Staff and head of the Mathematics and Computation Section. He has held leadership roles in SIAM, APS, and AGU, serves as an editor for several journals, and is a Joint Faculty Professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Awards: He received the SIAM Geosciences Career Prize in 2017 and the DOE Young Investigator Award in 2003. He is a fellow of SIAM and of the American Physical Society.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 11:41 (CET).