Profile
Bonita V. Saunders

Bonita V. Saunders is a member of the Mathematical and Computational Sciences Division of the Information Technology Laboratory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. In 1985 she was the first African American and first woman to obtain a Ph.D. in computational and applied mathematics from Old Dominion University. Her research interests include numerical grid generation, numerical solution of partial differential equations and visualization of special functions.

In 2001 she was selected by the National Association of Mathematicians (NAM) to present the Claytor Lecture at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in New Orleans in memory of W. W. Schieffelin Claytor, one of the first African Americans to publish mathematical research beyond the dissertation.

As the principal developer of Graphics for the DLMF project, she has used her knowledge of mesh generation and computer graphics to manage the design and development of informative graphs and dynamic interactive visualizations of high level functions over both simply and multiply connected domains.