ISSUED: 11 November 2013
MEDIA CONTACT: Valerie Owens
SHEPHERDSTOWN, WV — Dr. Sommer Gentry will present a talk titled “Operations Research in Organ Transplantation: The Greatest Good” on Monday, November 18 at 3:10 p.m. at Shepherd University’s Robert C. Byrd Science and Technology Center, room 108. The talk, part of the Shepherd S-STEM Club seminar series, is underwritten by a National Science Foundation S-STEM grant.
Gentry is an associate professor of mathematics at the U.S. Naval Academy, a research associate at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and a senior investigator with the Scientific Registry for Transplant Recipients. She designed optimization methods used for nationwide kidney paired donation registries in both the U.S. and Canada. Gentry’s work in this area has attracted media coverage by Time Magazine, Science, Reader’s Digest, Scientific American, and the Discovery Channel.
The 2009 recipient of the Mathematical Association of America’s Henry L. Alder Award for distinguished teaching by a beginning mathematics faculty member, Gentry earned a B.S. in mathematical computation science and an M.S. in operations research from Stanford and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT.
Operations research is the discipline of applying mathematical methods to help make better decisions. Gentry will examine issues that arise when decisions are made about transplanting human organs, including prioritizing recipients who are predicted to live the longest with a donated organ thereby excluding older candidates and ethnic minorities, and the accuracy of current models used to determine who would be a more successful transplant candidate.
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