Irene Fonseca and Manuela Veloso have been recognized in Forbes Portugal’s 2024 list of the Most Powerful Women in Business, in the Education and Science category.
Irene Fonseca joined Carnegie Mellon University in 1987 and is currently the Director of the Center for Nonlinear Analysis.
For her teaching and research contributions to CMU, Irene Fonseca was honored with the Mellon College of Science endowed chair in 2003 and named a University Professor in 2014.
Irene Fonseca has significantly contributed to the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program, serving as the coordinator of the dual degree doctoral program in Applied Mathematics and advising several doctoral students and postdocs. She also served as principal investigator at CMU under the math project Thin Structures, Homogenization and Multi Phase Problems.
In 2018 Irene Fonseca was installed as the first Kavčić-Moura University Professor of Mathematics. In early 2024 she was appointed Vice-President of American Mathematical Society (AMS) for 2025-2027 and is currently a fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics and the European Academy of Sciences.
In recognition for her contributions to the advancement of research in her area of expertise, Irene Fonseca was bestowed a knighthood in the Military Order of St. James (Grande Oficial da Ordem Militar de Santiago da Espada) by the then President of Portugal, Jorge Sampaio, in 1997.
Manuela Veloso is Head of J.P. Morgan Chase AI Research and Herbert A. Simon University Professor Emerita at Carnegie Mellon University, where she was previously Faculty in the Computer Science Department and Head of the Machine Learning Department. Her recent interests are in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Symbiotic Human-Robot Autonomy, Continuous Learning Systems, and AI in Finance.
Under the CMU Portugal Program she led multiple collaborative projects and has been an advisor to CMU Portugal Ph.D. students in the areas of Computer Science, Robotics and Machine Learning. In 2021, she was ranked among the 10 most Influential Women in Engineering and in 2022 she was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for her “contributions to artificial intelligence and its applications in robotics and the financial service industry.” Veloso is past President of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and co-founder and a past President of the RoboCup Federation.
In her career she has received numerous awards and honors, including: National Science Foundation CAREER Award, Allen Newell Medal for Excellence in Research, Radcliffe Fellow, Einstein Chair Professor of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the ACM/SIGART Autonomous Agents Research Award.
She is also a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
Profiles available in Forbes Magazine: Irene Fonseca I Manuela Veloso (in Portuguese).
