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I'll use this box to insert an article about me and an award. It tells a lot about my professional life and the fact that for about 15 years I was almost the only woman faculty member in Engineering at Cornell University. This is excerpted from an article that appeared in the Cornell Chronicle Feb. 2012 about Christine Moore ( Shoemaker), El Camino High, 1962
Title: Shoemaker elected to National Academy of Engineering
Christine (Moore) Shoemaker, Cornell’s Joseph P. Ripley Professor of Engineering, has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering, among the highest professional distinctions for an engineer.
Shoemaker, a Professor in the Cornell School of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) and School of Operations Research and Information Engineering, was cited “for development of decision-making optimization algorithms for environmental and water resources problems.”
Her research focuses on 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 and applications to data from complex, nonlinear environmental systems. Shoemaker received her Ph.D. in mathematics under the supervision of Richard Bellman in optimal control, and she chose to focus on environmental applications.
Shoemaker’s research is interdisciplinary; she has supervised PhD students from a number of fields including Operations Research and Information Engineering and Applied Mathematics, in addition to students from her home field CEE. She has had NSF funding from four different Directorates. Her projects are often in collaboration with other faculty and include physical and biological groundwater remediation, pesticide management, ecology, climate modeling, carbon sequestration, and surface water pollutant transport in large watersheds.
Professor Shoemaker is a Distinguished Member of the American Society of Civil Engineering (ASCE). She has been elected a Fellow in the following professional societies: American Geophysical Union (Hydrology section), ASCE, and INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and Management Science). She also won a Humboldt Research Prize from Germany. She initiated and led a 9-year multidisciplinary international project (sponsored by SCOPE and United Nations Environment Program) that brought information and workshops about groundwater contamination to developing countries at a time (1987-1996) when those regions were doing little to prevent contamination from industrial chemicals. Such contamination is often irreversible or extremely expensive to remove because it is in groundwater, so prevention is the best strategy.
Prof. Shoemaker was the first woman faculty member in the Cornell College of Engineering to be promoted to tenure. In 1985 she was the first woman to be a Cornell Engineering Department Chairperson. She received a national award from the Society of Women Engineers in 1991 for her scholarship and efforts to encourage women engineers during years when there were very few woman students or faculty in engineering.
Membership in the National Academy of Engineering honors those who have made outstanding contributions to “engineering research, practice or education, including, where appropriate, significant contributions to the engineering literature,” and to the “pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional fields of engineering, or developing/implementing innovative approaches to engineering education.”
