Patience Anne Cowie (27 January 1964 – 7 April 2020) was a Professor of Earth System Dynamics at the University of Bergen.

Cowie moved to the Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University for her graduate studies and earned master's degree in 1989.

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.

Cowie has investigated the origins of earthquakes, and was the first to identify that fault zones deform the same way predicted by experiments in laboratories.

[4] The citation read, "Patience Cowie's research career has been outstanding from its outset: her seminal PhD work, carried out with Chris Scholz at the Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory, produced novel insights into the way faults grow and interact, and explained the physical mechanisms behind fault linkage and the reason why fault displacement-length scaling occurs in natural systems... Patience's research is characterised by deep clarity of thought, and represents a judicious combination of numerical modelling, seismic analysis and field observation... Patience Cowie, you are an inspirational and far-sighted geoscientist, who has revolutionized our understanding of the growth and interaction of faults".