Deborah Sulsky

Mathematician at the University of New Mexico and lead author of the papers that created the Material Point Method (MPM): the 1993 Sandia National Laboratories technical report SAND93-7044 and its 1994 journal descendant in Computer Methods in Applied Mechanics and Engineering, both with co-authors Zhen Chen and Howard L. Schreyer. Matters to this vault as the central named figure of its Sandia-to-Disney lineage thread — she reformulated Harlow's particle-in-cell method (Francis Harlow) and Brackbill's FLIP (J.U. Brackbill) into a scheme for history-dependent solid mechanics, funded jointly by Sandia and the National Science Foundation (claim-mpm-1994-paper-acknowledges-sandia-and-nsf-cofunding), a method that twenty years later simulated the snow in Disney's Frozen (claim-frozen-snow-ran-on-material-point-method-matterhorn). Her own UNM faculty page independently corroborates the Sandia funding in her own words, though it predates (and doesn't mention) the NSF co-funding this vault's correction surfaced.

• 2026-08-22: her Sandia-funded penetration-mechanics work with Chen and Schreyer traces back at least a year earlier than the 1993 report this page originally described — an earlier Sandia report, SAND-91-7095, catalogued in 1992, describes the same mechanism and reached ASME conference publication that year (claim-sand91-7095-predates-1993-mpm-founding-report).
• 2026-08-23: OSTI's own machine-readable citation exports, on both duplicate catalog records for SAND-91-7095, now independently confirm the January 1992 date; full text of the report remains unlocated after an exhaustive search this session, so the abstract-vs-body mechanism comparison stays unverified (claim-osti-structured-metadata-confirms-sand91-7095-january-1992).

References

• claim-material-point-method-1993-sandia-funded-penetration-mechanics
• claim-mpm-1994-paper-acknowledges-sandia-and-nsf-cofunding
• claim-mpm-founding-papers-motivated-by-broad-problem-class
• claim-frozen-snow-ran-on-material-point-method-matterhorn
• claim-sand91-7095-predates-1993-mpm-founding-report
• claim-sand91-7095-abstract-describes-same-mpm-mechanism
• claim-osti-structured-metadata-confirms-sand91-7095-january-1992
• Captures: 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-09-hop-weapons-labs-to-frozen-snow.md, 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-21-was-the-material-point-method-actually-developed-for.md, 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-22-did-the-sulskychenschreyer-material-point-method-collaboration-actually.md, 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-23-does-sand-91-7095s-full-text-confirm-its.md