Description: A kidney  Sommer Gentry
  Associate Professor, Mathematics
  U.S. Naval Academy

    Phone: 410-293-6724
    Email:
gentry@usna.edu
    Curriculum Vitae (or in pdf)

    Click the kidney for a recent talk I have given about my research, or see
    http://www.OptimizedMatch.com

Kidney Paired Donation Flash Puzzles!   These puzzles (easier and  harder), by Scott Kim,  were featured in Discover Magazine and at Stanford University’s School of Engineering Alumni website.  My alumni profile is here.

About me
I graduated from Stanford University in 1998 with a B.S. in Mathematical and Computational Science and a M.S. in Operations Research.  I spent a year at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories before completing a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2005.  I am an Associate Professor in the mathematics department at the U.S. Naval Academy and also affiliated with the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

My research in optimization in kidney transplantation has been profiled in Science and TIME magazine, and I was a guest on the Diane Rehm show in 2005.  A one-hour Discovery channel show featured the work of myself and the transplant team at Johns Hopkins in arranging a three-way paired donation, and our research also played a part in an episode of the mathematical detective show Numb3rs.  I have been an invited speaker at Stanford University, MIT, Georgia Tech, the University of Maryland College Park, and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.  I serve as an advisor to both the United States and Canada in their efforts to create national paired donation registries.   I collaborate with my husband, Dorry Segev, who is a transplant surgeon, on research in optimization and simulation for organ allocation.  Our group helped lobby for Congress to clarify the legal status of kidney paired donation, which the House and Senate did in December 2007.

In 2009 the Mathematical Association of America selected me for a national teaching award, the Henry L. Alder award, which recognizes distinguished teaching by a beginning college or university mathematics faculty member.  I received an American Society of Transplant Surgeons Top Ten Abstracts award for my submission to the 2009 ASTS Winter Symposium.  As a graduate student, I received a Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship (CSGF) and a Best Student Paper award at the 2003 IEEE Systems, Man, Cybernetics Conference.  I won a related CSGF essay contest for technical writing that effectively communicates computational science to a lay audience.  The essay appeared in the 2007 Compose publication. 

Media Mentions

TIME Magazine, Innovators, The Kidney Connection 9/12/05 (PDF)
Reader's Digest feature 3/06 (PDF)
The Diane Rehm Show on National Public Radio 3/18/05 (RealPlayer)
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Alumni Profile, 2008 (Web)
Stanford University School of Engineering Alumni Profile, September 06 (Web)
SIAM News, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics December 2008 (Web)
American Mathematical Society Mathematical Moments poster and podcast (PDF)

Science News, Math Trek, August 2008 (Web)
Technology Review, MIT's Magazine of Innovation Technology 3/06 (Web)  
CBS TV Interview 1/27/06 (WMV)
Baltimore Sun 1/27/06 (PDF)
Science 3/12/04 (PDF)
Technology Review, MIT's Magazine of Innovation Technology 6/04 (PDF)
MIT Tech Talk 6/01/05 (PDF)
5678 dance magazine Spring 2004 (PDF)
TV News story at ScienCentral 3/23/04 (Quicktime)
Radio interview on KMOX News 5/12/04 (MP3)
MIT News Office press release (Web)
MIT Tech Talk 2/4/04 (PDF)
Boston Globe 3/16/04 (PDF)
DEIXIS 2004-2005 CSGF Annual Report
SIAM News, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics December 2004 (Web)

Publications

Material contained herein is made available for the purpose of peer review and discussion and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Department of the Navy or the Department of Defense.

D. Segev, S. Gentry.  Kidneys for sale: Whose attitudes matter?  American Journal of Transplantation, 10(5): 1113-4, 2010.

S. Gentry, R.A. Montgomery, B. Swihart, and D.Segev.  The roles of dominos and nonsimultaneous chains in kidney paired donation.  American Journal of Transplantation, 9(6): 1330-1336, May 2009.

S. Gentry, T. S. Michael, and D. Segev.  Maximum matchings in graphs for allocating kidney paired donation.  In revision. 

 

S. Gentry, D. Segev, and R.A. Montgomery.  Working together towards a national kidney paired donation program.  Letter, American Journal of Transplantation 8(2): 464, February 2008.

 

D. Segev, L. Kucirka, S. Gentry, R.A. Montgomery.  Utilization and outcomes of kidney paired donation in the United States. Transplantation: 86(4):502-10, Aug 27 2008.

 

D. Segev, S. Gentry, R.A. Montgomery.  Response to 'Waiting time and use of living donors'.  Letter, American Journal of Transplantation 8(3): 722, March 2008.

 

S. Gentry, D. Segev, M. Simmerling, and R.A. Montgomery.  Expanding kidney paired donation through participation by compatible pairs. American Journal of Transplantation, 7(10): 2361-2370, October 2007.

D. Segev, S. Gentry, R.A. Montgomery.  Association between waiting times for kidney transplantation and rates of live donation.  American Journal of Transplantation, 7(10): 2406-2413, October 2007.

 

S. Gentry.  Practitioner's Commentary: The outstanding kidney exchange papers. UMAP Journal 28.2, Summer 2007.

 

S. Gentry.  Optimization over graphs for kidney paired donation. Chapter, Optimization in Medicine and Biology, Gino Lim, editor. 2008.

 

E.S. Woodle, Y. Miao, D. Goldfarb, D. Segev, S. Gentry, A. Waterman, M. Aeder, R.M. Lewis, R. Shapiro.  Kidney paired donation: State of the science and practice.  Invited review article, Current Opinion in Organ Transplantation 12(4):384-389, August 2007.

 

C. E. Simpkins, R. A. Montgomery, A. M. Hawxby, J. E. Locke, S. E. Gentry, D. S. Warren, D. L. Segev. Cold ischemia time and allograft outcomes in live donor renal transplantation: is live donor organ transport feasible?  American Journal of Transplantation, 7(1):99-107, Jan 2007.

 

R.A. Montgomery, S. Gentry, W.H. Marks, D.S. Warren, J. Hiller, J. Houp, A.A. Zachary, J.K. Melancon, W.R. Maley, H. Rabb, C.E. Simpkins, and D. Segev.  Domino paired kidney donation: a strategy to make best use of live non-directed donation.  Lancet, vol. 268, p. 419-421, 2006.

 

D. Segev, S. Gentry, and R.A. Montgomery.  Relative roles for list paired exchange, live donor paired exchange, and desensitization.  American Journal of Transplantation, 6(2): 437, Feb 2006.

 

D. Segev, S. Gentry, D. Warren, B. Reeb, and R.A. Montgomery.  Kidney paired donation: Optimizing the use of live donor organs.  Journal of the American Medical Association, vol. 293, p. 1883-1890, 2005.

S. Gentry, D. Segev, and R.A. Montgomery.  A comparison of populations served by kidney paired donation and list donation.  American Journal of Transplantation, 2005, August, 5(8): 1914-21.

D. Segev, S. Gentry, J.K. Melancon, and R.A. Montgomery. Characterization of waiting times in a simulation of kidney paired donation.  American Journal of Transplantation, 2005, October 5(10): 2448-55.

E. Hsu, S. Gentry, and J. Popovic, "Example-based control of human motion", Eurographics / ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Computer Animation, 2004.

S. Gentry and R. Murray-Smith, "Haptic dancing: human performance at haptic decoding with a vocabulary", IEEE Systems, Man, Cybernetics Conference, vol. 4, pp.3432-3437, 2003.
Student Best Paper award. 

S. Gentry and E. Feron, "Modelling musically meaningful choreography", IEEE Systems, Man, Cybernetics Conference 2004.

S. Gentry and E. Feron, "Musicality experiments in lead and follow dance", IEEE Systems, Man, Cybernetics Conference 2004.

S. Gentry, S. Wall, I. Oakley and and R. Murray-Smith, "Got Rhythm? Haptic-only lead and follow dancing", Proceedings of Eurohaptics, pp. 481-488, Dublin, Ireland, July 2003.

V. Kulkarni and S. Gentry, "Optimal Mode Changes for Highway Transportation Safety", IEEE Systems, Man, Cybernetics Conference, vol. 2, pp.1235-1240, 2003.

J. De Mot, V. Kulkarni, S.Gentry,V. Gavrilets and E. Feron, "Coordinated Path Planning for a UAV Cluster". The First AINS Symposium, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, May 2002.

J. De Mot, V. Kulkarni, S.Gentry and E. Feron, "Spatial
Distribution Results for Efficient Multi-Agent Navigation". IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, Las Vegas, NV, vol. 4, pp. 3776-3781, December 2002.

S. Gentry, "Partial Inverse Optimization", MIT Lab for Information and Decision Systems Report, LIDS-P-2532, December, 2001.

S. Gentry, V. Saligrama and E. Feron, "Dynamic Inverse Optimization", Proceedings of American Control Conference, Volume 6, pp. 4722-7, 2001.

S. Gentry, S. Venkatesh and E. Feron, "Identifying Constrained Receding Horizon Controllers", 2000 Allerton Conference.