My Passion for Math: Why I Teach Mathematics for UL Lafayette
Dr. Azmy Ackleh is Dean of the Ray P. Authement College of Sciences, a professor of mathematics, 
and a member of the graduate faculty at UL Lafayette. He joined UL Lafayette in 1995 as an assistant professor and worked through the academic ranks to become dean in August 2013. Dean Ackleh is a prolific researcher, having published over 130 peer-reviewed research articles and received more than $8M in external funding. In addition, he mentored 15 math doctoral students and now, even as the dean, Dr. Ackleh is actively training doctoral students.
Curiously, he didn’t get his start in math. After majoring in mechanical engineering for his first two years of college, Dr. Ackleh switched to mathematics upon discovering a love for solving math problems as if he were solving puzzles. From there, he pursued master’s and doctorate degrees in math.
In 1988, while earning his masters degree, Dr. Ackleh worked as a teaching assistant and discovered a love for teaching.
“It’s just a joyful feeling when a student understands the way you’re disseminating knowledge and information to them — it is thrilling,” he says. “You take the time to show them your passion for the subject. You’re teaching them, looking at them and asking, ‘Do you understand?’ And when they really, really grasp it, you can see the joy in their eyes. It’s a feeling that can’t be described.”
Dr. Ackleh has been teaching math at the college level ever since, and deeply enjoys working with students in the mathematics graduate program at UL Lafayette. He says his favorite part of working with students is watching them grow from consuming knowledge to creating it and contributing their own work to the field.
“I love seeing that transition from ‘I can read a book and tell you what is in it’ to ‘I can write my own book,’ or ‘I can write my own research paper,’ or ‘I can solve a problem that no one has solved before,’” he says. “By the time they reach that point, you feel that they’re not a student anymore. They’re a fully fledged collaborator of mine.”
Why study math at UL Lafayette?
The mathematics graduate programs at UL Lafayette have a small student-to-faculty ratio, which gives graduate students in mathematics a lot of face- time and close interaction with their faculty. Beyond that, it’s a close-knit group, where faculty and staff become family.
“By my way of thinking, graduate students are academic daughters and sons,” says Dr. Ackleh, “and I feel like my graduate students are my daughters and sons.” Dr. Ackleh’s Ph.D. graduates are teaching math at the college level, too, at universities across the country.
The math department’s main strength, however, is its focus on interdisciplinary studies. Unlike other universities where math and statistics are housed in separate departments, UL Lafayette’s Department of Mathematics includes statistics along with applied and pure mathematics. Having those three fields of study under the same umbrella gives UL Lafayette’s students a better chance to engage in interdisciplinary studies both within and outside the department.
Math faculty and graduate students are working on research projects with others in biology, engineering, education, physics, and more to conduct exciting research. And the proof is in their success in obtaining research funding. In 2015, faculty members in the Department of Mathematics served as principal investigators or co-principal investigators on projects that garnered than $6 million in funding.
From 2003-2011, Dr. Ackleh co-led a study on the urban population dynamics of green tree frogs, which was, at the time, the longest study of its type based on urban capture-mark-recapture experiments on amphibians. After collecting the data on green tree frogs’ capture-mark-recapture populations, Dr. Ackleh and his team developed a statistical model to estimate the population levels during these years and and to predict the population levels for subsequent years. What began as a research project for undergraduates grew into a research project that produced thirty trained undergraduates, six doctoral dissertations, and seventeen publications.
The aim is to develop a mathematical model for predicting amphibian dynamics that is flexible enough to be adjusted to study the dynamics of other amphibian species across the world. Currently, Dr. Ackleh and his crew are working to study the impact of the chytrid disease on the population through mathematical modeling, including determining the best time of year to inoculate amphibians with a specific bacterium to protect against chytrid disease.
“That’s the puzzling thing about research: you start asking a question, and it grows!” he says. “You solve it, and you see another question — so it’s like a spiderweb. It starts branching. And I haven’t solved all the questions related to this project that I am interested in solving — yet.”
In addition, through a collaboration with the Department of Physics, Dr. Ackleh now is analyzing acoustic data collected from the depths of the Gulf of Mexico to create statistical models that will determine density of marine mammal populations in the Gulf of Mexico. Here, one of the main goals of the research is to develop mathematical models that will provide insights into the impact of natural disasters on the dynamics of marine mammals in the Gulf and, in particular, on the persistence of such populations.
Dr. Ackleh says it’s important that students gain more than one set of skills to address major problems—and researching with other experts across disciplines is imperative for solving the fundamental issues that our world faces today.
“We live in a world where the knowledge of mathematics helps you view world problems in a particular way, in my opinion,” he says. “There’s a universality in the language of mathematics that applies to many fields. As a mathematician, having this unique set of skills allows you to take these very hard, real-world problems and phenomena—be they in biology, physics, or engineering—abstract them, translate them into equations, and then solve the equations and contribute to our knowledge and understanding of a particular phenomenon.”