Christine Shoemaker

Christine Ann Shoemaker

Joseph P. Ripley Professor of Engineering Emerita
Civil and Environmental Engineering

Biography

In July 1, 2002, by a committee of other endowed professors in the College of Engineering, Christine Shoemaker was elected to the position of Joseph P. Ripley Professor of Engineering. This appointment is given for her excellence in research and in teaching. Established in May 1968 by Joseph P. Ripley and funded in part by the Ford Foundation, the endowment provides a distinguished professorship which Mr. Ripley requested be held by professors "who have had and will have a major impact on the development of the College."

Research Interests

Prof. Shoemaker's research focuses on finding cost-effective, robust solutions for environmental problems by using optimization, modeling and statistical analyses. This includes development of general purpose, numerically efficient nonlinear and global optimization algorithms utilizing high performance computing (including asynchronous parallelism) and applications to data on complex, nonlinear environmental systems. Her algorithms address local and global continuous and integer optimization, stochastic optimal control, and uncertainty quantification problems. In her recent research algorithm efficiency is improved with the use of surrogate response surfaces iteratively built during the research process and with intelligent algorithms that effectively utilize parallel and distributed computing. Her applications areas include physical and biological groundwater remediation, carbon sequestration, pesticide management, ecology, and calibration of climate and watershed models. The optimization and uncertainty quantification effort is used to improve model forecasts, to evaluate monitoring schemes and to have a tool for comparing alternative water and environmental management practices. Algorithms that are efficient because they require relatively few simulations are essential for doing calibration and uncertainty analysis on computationally expensive engineering simulation models. Professor Shoemaker has also been involved in multidisciplinary international outreach/research efforts for protecting groundwater resources from contamination and in helping to bring more women in engineering and computational mathematics.

Selected Publications

  • Tipaluck, Krityakierne, J. Mueller, Christine Ann Shoemaker.  2014.  "SO-MODS: Optimization for High Dimensional Computationally Expensive Multi-Modal Functions with Surrogate Search."  Paper presented at IEEE CEC Conference, Beijing, China,  July (3rd Quarter/Summer).
  • Woodbury, J D., Christine Ann Shoemaker, Z M. Easton, D M. Cowan.  2014. "APPLICATION OF SWAT WITH AND WITHOUT VARIABLE SOURCE AREA HYDROLOGY TO A LARGE WATERSHED."  Journal of the American Water Resources Association 50 (1): 42-56.
  • Mueller, J., R. Paudel, Christine Ann Shoemaker, J. Woodbury, Y. Wang, N Mahowald.  2014. "CH4 parameter estimation in CLM 4.5Bgc using surrogate global optimization."  Geoscientific Model Development.
  • Li, F F., Christine Ann Shoemaker, Jeffrey Qiu, J- H. Wei.  2014. "Hierarchical multi-reservoir optimization modeling for real-world complexity with application to the Three Gorges System."  Environmental Modeling and Software.
  • Mueller, J., Christine Ann Shoemaker.  2014. "Influence of ensemble surrogate models and sampling strategy on the solution quality of algorithms for computationally expensive black-box global optimization problems."  Journal of Global Optimization 60 (2): 123-144.

Selected Awards and Honors

  • National Academy of Engineering Member (National Academy of Engineering) 2012
  • Distinguished (Honorary) Member (American Society of Civil Engineers) 2006
  • National Engineering Award (American Association of Engineering Societies) 2014
  • Fellow (American Geophysical Union) 2003
  • Fellow (Institute for Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS)) 2004

Education

  • B.S. (Mathematics), University of California,  Davis, 1966
  • M.S. (Mathematics), University of Southern California, 1969
  • Ph.D. (Mathematics), University of Southern California, 1971