Sommer Elizabeth Gentry is an American mathematician who works as a professor of mathematics at the United States Naval Academy and as a research associate in surgery at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Her research concerns operations research and its applications to the optimization of organ transplants,^[1] and has led to the discovery of geographic inequities in organ allocation.^[2] She is also interested in dancing, teaches swing dancing at the Naval Academy,^[3] and wrote her doctoral dissertation on the mathematics and robotics of dance.^[4]

Gentry is originally from California.^[5] As a girl, she was inspired to continue in mathematics by the recreational mathematics columns of Martin Gardner and Ivars Peterson.^[6] In 1993, as a senior at Thousand Oaks High School, Gentry had the highest individual score at the Ventura County, California county-level Academic Decathlon.^[7] She graduated from Stanford University in 1998, with both a bachelor's degree in mathematical and computational sciences and a master's degree in engineering-economic systems and operations research.

She completed her Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2005.^[1] Her dissertation, Dancing cheek to cheek: haptic communication between partner dancers and swing as a finite state machine, was supervised by Eric Feron.^[4] In her doctoral research, she modeled the language and notation of dance mathematically using finite state machines, programmed a robot to dance,^[8] and used her model to improve haptic communications between humans and robots, with the goal of eventually producing human-machine surgical collaborations that could be more effective than human or robotic surgeons working alone.^[9][10]

Gentry is married to Israeli surgeon Dorry Segev. She met him at a Lindy Hop dance competition in 1999, and a few years later they won the British Championship in Lindy Hop. She has also worked with Segev on the Kidney Paired Donation program.^[5]

In 2017, Gentry was a competitor on the Fox Television game show Superhuman.^[11]

She has also been a vocal critic of the airport passenger screening procedures of the US Transportation Security Administration, which she characterizes as sexual assault.^[12]

Gentry won the Henry L. Alder Award for Distinguished Teaching by a Beginning Faculty Member of the Mathematical Association of America in 2009.^[13] She won the Navy Meritorious Civilian Service Award in 2014,^[1] and in the same year was a finalist for the INFORMS Daniel H. Wagner Prize for Excellence in Operations Research Practice.^[14] She will deliver a Mathematical Association of America (MAA) invited lecture at MathFest 2021.^[15]