KU Engineering associate dean recognized nationally for leadership and mentoring

LAWRENCE — Suzanne Shontz, University of Kansas School of Engineering associate dean for research and graduate programs, was named the 2024 winner of the James Corones Award in Leadership, Community Building and Communication from the Krell Institute. The award will be presented later this year at the KU Lawrence campus.

The Krell Institute is an Iowa-based nonprofit founded in 1997 to serve science, technology and education communities and support the U.S. Department of Energy’s Computational Science Graduate Fellowship.

A committee of Krell Institute collaborators and staff recognized Shontz “for her mentoring and leadership on the campuses she’s served and in the broader research community.” The committee also cited “her hands-on efforts to help budding scientists develop a wide range of communications skills, from workshops on poster preparation to scientific writing. What’s more, Associate Dean Shontz has been active early in the STEM pipeline, having organized summer camps for middle and high school students.”

“I’m very honored to receive this award, which is named after one of my co-authors. It recognizes my leadership roles and mentoring efforts at KU and the other campuses I previously served. Also noted is my leadership in the applied mathematics and computational science community,” Shontz said.  

Krell President Shelly Olsan noted Shontz’s exceptional academic career and leadership in professional activities that highlight her dedication to her field.

“Dr. Shontz’s efforts teaching the next generation of scientists to communicate their work to broader communities have a clear relationship to this award and its founder,” Olsan said.

The Corones Award is named for Krell Institute founder James Corones, who died in 2017, and recognizes midcareer scientists and engineers for their research impact, mentoring, scientific-community activities and their commitment to communicating science and technology.

In her addition to her role as associate dean, Shontz is a professor the Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science. She directs the computational bioengineering track in the school’s Bioengineering Program and the Mathematical Methods in Interdisciplinary Computing Center at KU’s Institute for Information Sciences. She is also affiliated with the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Before joining KU in August 2014, she was on the faculty at Mississippi State and Pennsylvania State universities and previously was a postdoctoral research scholar at the University of Minnesota’s Minnesota Supercomputing Institute. In 2011, she was named an NSF Presidential Early Career for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) Award recipient.

Shontz received her doctorate in applied mathematics from Cornell University in 2005 after earning a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics and Bachelor of Science in chemistry from the University of Northern Iowa in 1999 and her master's degrees in computer science and applied mathematics from Cornell University in 2002.