Barbara Shrauner

Biography

Barbara Abraham Shrauner held postdoctoral appointments at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles where she held the AAUW Illinois Fellowship and then at the NASA-Ames Research Center where she held a NAS-NASA Fellowship. She joined the Department of Electrical Engineering at Washington University in 1966. She retired from full-time service as Professor in 2003 and is currently a Senior Professor in the Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering. She is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a Senior Member of IEEE.

Research

She has done research in the past on space plasmas, on plasma theory, on charge effects in blood clotting, on high electric field transport in III-V semiconductors, on plasma etching of semiconductors and on sputter deposition by plasmas of thin films such as GaAs for applications in infrared optoelectronics. Her recent research includes symmetry analysis of nonlinear differential equations, especially hidden symmetries of nonlinear ordinary differential equations.. The analysis of hidden symmetries of linear and nonlinear partial differential partial equations has discovered a new type of hidden symmetry not seen in ordinary differential equations. She has also done model research in phloem translocation in plants and leaf initiation that determines phyllotaxis of leaves in plants. She has investigated several plasma problems recently. One is the Weibel instability of counter streaming streams that has applications in collisionless shocks. An ongoing project is a generalization of force-free Harris sheets in the Vlasov-Maxwell approximation that may model current sheets in the reconnections of magnetic fields. Her recent research on analytic solutions of nonlinear partial differential equations has expanded harmonic balance to include power index for all terms and identified the even or oddness of the net differentiation number of the terms as a test of possible solutions.