Michael Stephenson, Ph.D.
Director of Technology
Dr. Stephenson has more than 40 years of experience in pre- and post-processing for engineering analysis. He received his Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from Brigham Young University where he worked with Dr. Hank Christiansen an early pioneer of the field now known as scientific visualization. Following graduation, Dr. Stephenson accepted a faculty position at the University of Arizona. He returned to BYU to work with Dr. Christiansen in forming the Engineering Computer Graphics Laboratory and promoting computer-aided engineering, design and manufacture (CAEDM) education. He also began working with Ted Blacker, a former student, at Sandia National Laboratories on mesh generation research. Ted and Mike developed the paving algorithm during a sabbatical leave for Mike at Sandia. It was during this sabbatical that they wrote the first specification for a mesh generation workbench that became the blueprint for CUBIT.
Later Dr. Stephenson left BYU to work as a senior software engineer at WordPerfect Corp. on their presentation product. He then led the software process improvement effort at WordPerfect and after its merger with Novell, managed the engineering process group for the combined company. In 1997, he formed M.B. Stephenson & Associates to provide consulting services to CEI Software, developers of the EnSight visualization product. He ultimately returned to work with Sandia as a consultant on the CUBIT project from 1998-2011.
Dr. Stephenson is a co-founder and director of csimsoft.