---
title: "Deborah Sulsky"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "person"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "Deborah Sulsky"
aliases: []
first_seen: "2026-07-09T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["Material Point Method","University of New Mexico","Sandia National Laboratories","Zhen Chen","Howard L. Schreyer"]
seek_code_commit: "17d9798"
---


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
([[entity-francis-harlow|Francis Harlow]]) and Brackbill's FLIP
([[entity-j-u-brackbill|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