Center Participants

Margaret Cheney
Professor of Mathematical Sciences
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Education:
Ph.D., Mathematics, Indiana University, 1982
B.A., Mathematics and Physics (with high honors in Mathematics), Oberlin College, 1976

Career Highlights:
After completing two years of postdoctoral studies at Stanford University, Cheney joined Duke University as an assistant professor of mathematics. Four years later in 1988, she became an associate professor at Rensselaer and now holds the rank of professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences.

Cheney has taken a number of sabbaticals and visiting professor positions during her career, including stints at the Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division; the Program on Inverse Problems in Berkeley, California; the Department of Mathematics at the University of Mainz, in Mainz, Germany; the Center for Wave Phenomena at the Colorado School of Mines; the Rolf Nevanlinna Institute in Helsinki, Finland; the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications at the University of Minnesota; and the Division of Electromagnetic Theory, KTH, in Stockholm, Sweden. She also served as an associate for the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University and spent two summers as a visiting scientist for Ames Laboratory in Ames, Iowa.

She has earned several prestigious awards and recognitions, including being selected for the Lise Meitner Visiting Professorship in Lund, Sweden in 2000 and being named a Fellow of the Institute of Physics in 1999. Cheney was a part of a Rensselaer impedance imaging team that earned the ComputerWorld Smithsonian award in medicine in 1993; she also earned the National Science Foundation Faculty Award for Women in Science and Engineering in 1991, was named a member of the Institute for Theory and Computation of the Electromagnetics Academy in 1990, and won the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award in 1986. Cheney has served on the board of trustees for the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) since 1996.

Cheney is an active contributor to mathematical science publications including Inverse Problems, for which she has served as an editorial board member since 1998; SIAM’s Journal on Applied Mathematics, for which she was editor-in-chief from 1995-’97 and a member of the editorial board since 1994, and SIAM’s Monographs in Science and Engineering, for which she has served as a member of the editorial board since 1994.

Research Areas:
Professor Cheney works on inverse problems in acoustics and electromagnetic theory. Some of her work has dealt with low-frequency electromagnetic imaging, in which images are made of objects much smaller than the wavelength of the interrogating fields. More recently she has been working on remote sensing problems, including ground-penetrating radar, sonar, adaptive time-reversal methods in both acoustics and electromagnetics, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), and Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar (ISAR).

Selected Publications:

2006

C.J. Nolan, M. Cheney, T. Dowling, and G. Gaburro, "Enhanced angular resolution from multiply scattered waves", Inverse Problems 22, pp. 1817-1834 (2006)

B. Yazici, M. Cheney, and C.E. Yarman, "Synthetic-aperture inversion in the presence of noise and clutter", Inverse Problems 22, pp. 1705-1729. (2006)

2005

M. Cheney and B. Borden, "Microlocal analysis of GTD-based SAR models", Algorithms for synthetic Aperture Radar Imagery XII, ed. E.G. Zelnio and F.D. Garber, SPIE Proceedings series vol. 5808 (SPIE, Bellingham, WA), pp. 15-23 (2005)

B. Borden and M. Cheney, "Synthetic-aperture imaging from high-Doppler-resolution measurements", Inverse Problems 21, pp. 1-11 (2005)

2004

M. Cheney and R.J. Bonneau, "Imaging that exploits multipath scattering from point scatterers", Inverse Problems 20, pp. 1691-1711 (2004).

M. Cheney, "Synthetic-aperture assessment of a dispersive surface", International Journal of Imaging Systems and Technology 14, pp. 28-34 (2004).

M. Cheney and C.J. Nolan, "Synthetic-aperture Imaging through a Dispersive surface", Inverse Problems 20, pp. 507-532 (2004).

2003

M. Cheney and B. Borden, " Microlocal analysis of GTD-based SAR models", in Algorithms for Synthetic Aperture Radar Imagery XII, ed. E.G. Zelnio and F. D. Garber, SPIE Proceedings series vol. 5808 (SPIE, Bellingham, WA) (2003)

F. Natterer, M. Cheney, and B. Borden, "Resolution for Radar and X-Ray Tomography", Inverse Problems 19, (6) pp. S55-S64 (2003).

M. Cheney and B. Borden, "Microlocal Structure of Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar Data", Inverse Problems 19, (1) pp. 173-194 (2003).

C.J. Nolan and M. Cheney, "Synthetic Aperture Inversion for Arbitrary Flight Paths and Non-Flat Topography", Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Transactions on Image Processing 12, pp.1035-1043 (Sept. 2003).

2002

C.J. Nolan and M. Cheney, "Synthetic Aperture Inversion", Inverse Problems 18 (1), pp. 221-236 (2002).

2001

M. Cheney, "The Linear Sampling Method and the MUSIC Algorithm", Inverse Problems 17, (4) pp. 591-595 (2001).

M. Cheney, D. Isaacson, and M. Lassas, "Optimal Acoustic Measurements", SIAM Journal on Applied Mathematics 61, (5) pp. 1628-1647 (2001).

M. Cheney, “A Mathematical Tutorial on Synthetic Aperture Radar", SIAM Review 43, (2) pp. 301-312 (2001).

M. Cheney and G. Kristensson, "Optimal Electromagnetic Measurements", Technical Report LUTEDX/(TEAT-7091) Lund Institute of Technology, Department of Electroscience, Electromagnetic Theory, Sweden, pp. 1-24 (2001).

2000

M. Cheney and N. Bleistein, "An Asymptotic Wave Interpretation of Sonar Images", in Analytical and Computational Methods in Scattering and Applied Mathematics, F. Santosa and I. Stakgold, eds., Chapman & Hall/CRC Research Notes in Mathematics 417, (2000).

1999

M. Cheney, D. Isaacson, and J.C. Newell, "Electrical Impedance Tomography", SIAM Review 41, (1) pp. 85-101, (1999).

Contact Information:
Margaret Cheney
Department of Mathematical Sciences
420 Amos Eaton Hall
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
110 Eighth Street
Troy, N.Y. 12180
U.S.A.
(518) 276-2646
http://www.rpi.edu/~cheney

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Inverse Problems Center at Rensselaer
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 110 8th St., Troy, NY 12180-3590.
(518) 276-2145• E-mail: mclauj3@rpi.edu