External links
- Sommer and Dorry (shared personal page)
- Sommer Gentry publications indexed by Google Scholar
Sommer Elizabeth Gentry is an American mathematician who works as a professor of mathematics at the United States Naval Academy and as a research associate in surgery at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Her research concerns operations research and its applications to the optimization of organ transplants, [1] and has led to the discovery of geographic inequities in organ allocation. [2] She is also interested in dancing, teaches swing dancing at the Naval Academy, [3] and wrote her doctoral dissertation on the mathematics and robotics of dance. [4]
Gentry is originally from California. [5] As a girl, she was inspired to continue in mathematics by the recreational mathematics columns of Martin Gardner and Ivars Peterson. [6] In 1993, as a senior at Thousand Oaks High School, Gentry had the highest individual score at the Ventura County, California county-level Academic Decathlon. [7] She graduated from Stanford University in 1998, with both a bachelor's degree in mathematical and computational sciences and a master's degree in engineering-economic systems and operations research.
She completed her Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2005. [1] Her dissertation, Dancing cheek to cheek: haptic communication between partner dancers and swing as a finite state machine, was supervised by Eric Feron. [4] In her doctoral research, she modeled the language and notation of dance mathematically using finite-state machines, programmed a robot to dance, [8] and used her model to improve haptic communications between humans and robots, with the goal of eventually producing human-machine surgical collaborations that could be more effective than human or robotic surgeons working alone. [9] [10]
Gentry is married to Israeli surgeon Dorry Segev. She met him at a Lindy Hop dance competition in 1999, and a few years later they won the British Championship in Lindy Hop. She has also worked with Segev on the Kidney Paired Donation program. [5]
In 2017, Gentry was a competitor on the Fox Television game show Superhuman. [11]
She has also been a vocal critic of the airport passenger screening procedures of the US Transportation Security Administration, which she characterizes as sexual assault. [12]
Gentry won the Henry L. Alder Award for Distinguished Teaching by a Beginning Faculty Member of the Mathematical Association of America in 2009. [13] She won the Navy Meritorious Civilian Service Award in 2014, [1] and in the same year was a finalist for the INFORMS Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in Operations Research Practice. [14] She will deliver a Mathematical Association of America (MAA) invited lecture at MathFest 2021. [15]
