Thomas, Shawna

Educational Background

- Algorithms for robotic motion planning
- Motion planning applications to computational biology
- Computational geometry

Provost Academic Professional Track Faculty Teaching Excellence Award – 2023-2024
IBM Ph.D. Fellowship – 2008-2009
IBM Fran Allen Ph.D. Fellowship – 2007-2008
Graduate Research Excellence Award, Department of Computer Science – 2007-2008
Philanthropic Educational Organization Scholar Award – 2005-2006

“Fast Collision Detection for Motion Planning using Shape Primitive Skeletons.” Mukulika Ghosh, Shawna Thomas, Nancy M. Amato, in Proc. of the International Workshop on the Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics (WAFR), Me ́rida, Me ́xico, December 2018.
“Sampling Based Motion Planning with Reachable Volumes for High Degree of Freedom Manipulators.” Troy McMahon, Shawna Thomas, Nancy M. Amato, in the International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR), 37(7):779– 817, Jun 2018.
“A General and Flexible Search Framework for Disassembly Planning.” Timothy Ebinger, Sascha Kaden, Shawna Thomas, Robert Andre, Nancy M. Amato, Ulrike Thomas, in Proc. of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Brisbane, QLD, Australia, May 2018.
“Decoy Database Improvement for Protein Folding.” Hsin-Yi (Cindy) Yeh, Aaron Lindsey, Chih-Peng Wu, Shawna Thomas, Nancy M. Amato, in Journal of Computational Biology (JCB), 22(9):823–836, September 2015.
“MARRT: Medial Axis Biased Rapidly-Exploring Random Trees.” Jory Denny, Evan Greco, Shawna L. Thomas, Nancy M. Amato, in Proc. of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Hong Kong, China, June 2014.