Biographies of Invited Speakers

Professor Suzanne Lenhart - University of Tennessee at Knoxville

Suzanne Lenhart received her PhD in mathematics from the University of Kentucky in 1981 in the area of partial differential equations.  She is currently a full professor at the University of Tennessee. Her current research interests include applications of optimal control  of differential equations to environmental, biological and physical problems and quantum  mechanics.  She is a part-time employee of Oak Ridge National Laboratory.  She is the director of the Research Experiences for Undergraduates summer program  at UT.  She was the Mathematical Association of America Southeastern Section  Lecturer of the Year in 1999.  She has organized five workshops for female  graduate students and post-docs for the Association for Women in Mathematics.   She received the "Mentor of the Year" award from the Southern Regional Education  Board in 1998 for work in the Compact for Faculty Diversity program.  Lenhart has  79 research publications in the areas of partial differential equation and optimal control.    Lenhart has directed 4 PhD students and 18 masters students.  She just finished serving 6 years as an elected member of the SIAM Council.  She was recently elected to the Board of the Society for Mathematical Biology.   She is currently the President of the Association for Women in Mathematics.
 
 

Professor Linda Petzold - University of California at Santa Barbara

Dr. Linda R. Petzold is currently Professor in the Departments of Computer Science, and Mechanical and Environmental Engineering, and Director of the Computational Science and Engineering Program, at University of California Santa Barbara.  She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1978 from the University of Illinois.  From 1978-1985 she was a member of the Applied Mathematics Group at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, California, and from 1985-1991 she was Group Leader of the Numerical Mathematics Group at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.  From 1991-1997 she was Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Petzold was awarded the Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software in 1991, and the Dahlquist Prize, for numerical solution of differential equations, in 1999.  She is currently Vice President at Large of SIAM, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.  She served as SIAM Vice President for Publications from 1993-1998, and as Editor in Chief of the SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing from 1989-1993.  Her research interests include numerical ordinary differential equations, differential-algebraic equations, and partial differential equations, dynamic optimization, nonlinear model reduction, mathematical software and scientific computing.