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Sommer Gentry

United States Naval Academy

Sommer Gentry is Professor of Mathematics at the United States Naval Academy, and is also on the faculty of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She is a senior investigator with the U.S. Scientific Registry for Transplant Recipients. She has a B.S. in Mathematical and Computational Science and an M.S. in Operations Research, both from Stanford University, and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT.

Professor Gentry builds operations research models to improve access to organ transplantation. She has shown that redistricting U.S. liver allocation areas would save lives by significantly reducing harmful geographic disparity in access to liver transplants. This work on redistricting liver allocation was a finalist for the Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in Operations Research Practice.
She also designed optimization methods to maximize the number of kidney transplants possible through kidney exchanges, and served as an advisor to the United States and Canada in their efforts to create national paired donation registries. Her work helped convince Congress to clarify the legal status of kidney paired donation in December 2007.

Her research is funded by the National Institutes of Health and her findings have been highlighted in major media outlets including Scientific American, Time Magazine, Reader’s Digest, Science, the Discovery Channel, and National Public Radio.  Gentry has also received the MAA’s Henry L. Alder award for distinguished teaching.