Patience Cowie

Patience Anne Cowie (27 January 1964 – 7 April 2020) was a Professor of Earth System Dynamics at the University of Bergen. Her research has considered fault propagation and rift basins. She was awarded the 2016 Geological Society of London Coke medal.

Early life and education Cowie was born in the United Kingdom. She studied geology at Durham University and graduated in 1985. During her undergraduate degree she took part in field trips and became more interested in geological research. Cowie moved to the Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University for her graduate studies and earned master's degree in 1989. She remained there for her doctoral degree and completed her PhD under the supervision of Christopher Scholz in 1992. Her research considers the surface process responses to active faulting. These include studying the physical laws responsible for river erosion, how sediment is dispersed in rift basins and developing field testing models using source-to-sink approaches. She uses a range of research approaches, including data collected during field visits, theoretical and mathematical models. This includes the use of Lidar and ground-penetrating radar to monitor seismic slip. In 2003, Cowie was made an adjunct researcher at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. She was promoted to Professor of Geodynamics at the University of Edinburgh in 2008.

In 2011, Cowie joined the University of Bergen as a Professor of Geodynamics. Here she is co-leader of the Statoil-Norwegian Multi-Rift Project. Cowie has intensively investigated geological faults. She has studied the way that faults propagate, the variations in space and time due to the interactions of faults, the rates at which they slip and how damage zones develop in high porosity sandstones.

The Geological Society of London recognised the contributions that Cowie has made to geology in 2016 and awarded her the Coke medal.

Selected publications Her publications include:

She has served as the editor of the Geological Society of America journal Geology.

Personal life Cowie was married with two daughters, Esther and Saskia. Her husband, Leo Zijerveld took a career break during their childhood, completing a degree at the Open University. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2008.