Suzanne Shontz

Suzanne Shontz received her Ph.D. in applied mathematics from Cornell University in 2005. She received her B.A. in mathematics and B.S. in chemistry from the University of Northern Iowa in 1999 and her M.S. degrees in computer science and applied mathematics from Cornell University in 2002. Prior to joining Penn State in August 2006, she was a postdoctoral associate in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and a Minnesota Supercomputing Institute Research Scholar at the University of Minnesota. 

Professor Shontz's research interests lie in the area of parallel scientific computing.  In particular, her research focuses on the development of unstructured meshing and numerical optimization algorithms and their applications to computational medicine and computational materials science. Recent projects have included the development of efficient mesh optimization algorithms, the generation of meshes for biological computational fluid dynamics simulations, and the development of mesh warping algorithms for cardiology and elasticity applications.  Other recent projects have involved the development of efficient geometry optimization methods for electronic structure calculations and the use of approximation models in parallel nonlinear optimization.

Professor Shontz received a National Physical Science Consortium Fellowship from 1999-2004 and an Honorable Mention for the Alice T. Schafer Prize for Women in Mathematics in 1999. She served on the Program Committee for the 2009 International Meshing Roundtable Conference, the Professional Development Committee for the 2009 SIAM Annual Meeting, the Doctoral Showcase Committee for the 2009 Supercomputing Conference, the Posters Committee for the Posters Committee for the 2007 Supercomputing Conference, and the Panels and Workshops Committee for the 2006 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women and Computing. She also served as a panelist for the National Science Foundation and the Department of Defense since 2007.  She is a reviewer for the SIAAM Journal on Scientific Computing, ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software, Engineering with Computers, Computational Materials Science, the Journal of Computational Physics, the Journal of Chemical Physics, Computer Physics Communications, the International Meshing Roundtable Conference, the International Conference on Parallel Processing, and the ACM Crossroads Magazine.  She participated in the 2008 and 2006 Field-Mitacs Industrial Problem-Solving Workshops held at the Fields Institute in Canada, as an academic expert.  She has served as a mentor through the AWM Mentor Network since 2005.

Research Interests:

Parallel Scientific Computing, Mesh Generation, Numerical Optimization, Computational Materials Science, Computational Medicine

Selected Publications:

1. Saad Y., J.R. Chelikowsky, S. Shontz. 2009.  Numerical Methods for Electronic Structure Calculations of Materials. To appear in SIAM Review.  60 pages.
2. Shontz, S., V. E. Howle, P. D. Hough.  May 25-27, 2009.  Experience with Approximatins in the Trust-Region Parallel Direct Search Algorithm.  To appear in Proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Science (ICCS).  10 pages.  Baton Rouge, LA.
3. Shontz, S., P. Knupp.  October 2008.  The Effect of Vertex Reordering on 2D Local Mesh Optimization Efficiency.  Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Meshing Roundtable.  pp. 107-124.  Pittsburgh, PA.
   
4. Diachin, L., P. Knupp, T. Munson, S. Shontz. September 2006. A Comparison of Two Optimization Methods for Mesh Quality Improvement. Engineering with Computers 22(2):61-74.
   
5. Voshell, N., S. Shontz, L. Diachin, P. Knupp, T. Munson.  A Patch-based Mesh Optimization Algorithm for Partitioned Meshes.  Proceedings of the Ninth International Workshop on State-of-the-Art in Scientific and Parallel Computing (PARA 2008).  Norway.  (Under review)