Charles Wampler

Areas of Interest

Prof. Wampler is an applied mathematician and mechanical engineer with a joint appointment in the Department of Aerospace & Mechanical Engineering and the Department of Applied and Computational Mathematics and Statistics. Before joining Notre Dame, he worked 37 years at General Motors Research and Development primarily on robotics for automotive manufacturing and modeling of batteries for electric vehicles. With Andrew Sommese, now emeritus professor of ACMS, he published “Numerical Algebraic Geometry,” the seminal paper of the field, which concerns algorithms for solving systems of nonlinear equations.

He was a senior member of the NASA/GM team that designed and built Robonaut 2, which launched to the International Space Station in 2011. Wampler has been a member of the National Academy of Engineering since 2020, and he is a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM).