Shawn Walker is an assistant professor in mathematics at LSU. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, College Park. He held a postdoctoral position at the Courant Institute (New York University), and joined the LSU faculty in 2010 in the computational mathematics group. His research interests include: Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) related to free boundary and geometric evolution problems, numerical analysis and development of finite element methods (FEM), fast and robust mesh generation for complex moving interface problems, and PDE-constrained (shape) optimization.