Ursula van Rienen (born 1957)^[1] is a German applied mathematician and physicist whose research involves computational electrodynamics, the computational simulation of interactions between electromagnetic fields and biological tissue, and its applications in electrical brain stimulation.^[2] She is a university professor in the Institut für Allgemeine Elektrotechnik at the University of Rostock, where she holds the Chair of Electromagnetic Field Theory.^[3]

Van Rienen studied mathematics and physics at the University of Bonn, earning a vordiplom (the equivalent of a bachelor's degree) in 1979, and a diploma (the equivalent of a master's degree) in 1983, with a minor in operations research. She worked as a researcher at DESY, the German Electron Synchrotron research center, from 1983 to 1989.^[3] In 1989 she defended a doctoral thesis through the Technische Universität Darmstadt, titled Zur numerischen Berechnung zeitharmonischer elektromagntischer Felder in offenen, zylindersymetrischen Strukturen unter Verwendung von Mehrgitterverfahren [On the numerical calculation of time-harmonic electromagnetic fields in open, cylindrically symmetrical structures using multi-grid methods], supervised by Willi Törnig [de].^[3][4]

Beginning in 1990, she worked as a research assistant at the Technische Universität Darmstadt, and then a lecturer in 1995. In 1997 she completed a habilitation there, and in the same year took her current position as a professor at the University of Rostock.^[3]

At Rostock, she has been dean of the Faculty of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering from 2004 to 2006, and vice rector for research and research training from 2009 to 2013.^[3]

Van Rienen published her habilitation thesis as the book Numerical Methods in Computational Electrodynamics: Linear Systems in Practical Applications (Springer, 2001).^[5]

• Ursula van Rienen publications indexed by Google Scholar