Suzanne Lenhart

Chancellor’s Professor

Biography

Suzanne Lenhart is a Chancellor’s Professor and the James R. Cox Professor of Mathematics the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and was the Associate Director for Education and Outreach at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS, funded by the National Science Foundation) from 2009-2021.  She was a part-time member of the research staff at Oak Ridge National Laboratory for 22 years.

Dr. Lenhart is an applied mathematician working in partial differential equations, ordinary differential equations and optimal control. Her current research focuses on population models with applications in infectious diseases, invasive species, and natural resources. She has authored more than 250 journal articles, as well as 4 books, including Optimal Control applied to Biological Models and Mathematics for the Life Sciences.

She is a Fellow of the Association for Women in Mathematics, American Mathematical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and SIAM.

Dr. Lenhart has extensive education and outreach experience. She directed the Research Experiences for Undergraduates program in the Department of Mathematics for 15 years and directed such a program at NIMBioS for 12 years. She has supervised 33 PhD students and 36 masters students.

She was President of the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) in 2001-2003 and is currently the treasurer of the Association for Women in Science (AWIS) Tennessee Chapter.

She is a faculty sponsor for the UT AWM Student Chapter and SACNAS student chapter and directs the UT partnership in the NSF INCLUDES Alliance: The Alliance of Students with Disabilities for Inclusion, Networking, and Transition Opportunities in STEM (TAPDINTO-STEM).

Her research work is currently funded by a CDC grant, on Hospital Acquired infections through a subcontract with North Carolina State University.   She is also a co-PI on an NSF grant for the US-Africa Collaborative Research Network in Mathematical Sciences.

For information about the NIMBioS BioCalculus Assessment project and to request a copy of the assessment instrument from Suzanne Lenhart, use this link. http://www.nimbios.org/~gross/BioCalcAssessmentProject2020.html

Research

• Mathematical Biology
  • Optimal Control of ODEs, PDEs, discrete and integrodifference equations
• • Population Models, Infectious Diseases, One Health
• • Natural Resource Modeling, Invasive Species, Agent Based Models

• Partial Differential Equations
  • Parabolic Systems
• • First order PDEs for age structure models
• • Elliptic equations for population models

Education

Ph.D., Kentucky