Dr. Ted Blacker, Manager, Sandia National Labs
Dr. Ted Blacker began his career at Sandia Labs working as a computational analysts performing FEA simulations in solid mechanics and structural dynamics. He was drawn to research in meshing to solve the model building bottleneck in the analysis process. His discovery and development of the Paving algorithm provided the first all-quad general meshing tool, led to several patents and an eventual R&D 100 award. Further work in hexahedral meshing resulted in the establishment of the CUBIT project and the ongoing International Meshing Roundtable (now in its 25th year). He eventually left Sandia to work in private industry on a technology transfer leave of absence. Dr. Blacker worked for both FDI and FLUENT, leading the GAMBIT project development (a general geometry and meshing tool). He eventually returned to Sandia as a manager and has continued his research focus. He has published extensively and served on temporary assignment to the DoD CREATE program in Washington DC. Dr. Blacker currently manages 1) the team developing topology optimization for additive manufacture (PLATO), 2) the meshing and geometry research team (CUBIT) and 3) a team providing high performance computing infrastructure (Sierra Toolkit) for the SIERRA code base. Dr. Blacker obtained his BS and MS in CE from BYU, followed by a PhD from Northwestern University in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics.