In a letter dated September 19, AAAS fellow and UT Dallas physics Professor Mustapha Ishak-Boushaki was informed that he had been chosen to receive the 2022 UT System Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award.
“This award reflects the high regard your peers have for your qualities as a member of the faculty, and it gives us all great satisfaction to have you recognized by the Board of Regents for your exceptional teaching performance,” said the letter signed by Chancellor James Millikin and Chairman Kevin Eltife.
Ishak-Boushaki said, “This Regents’ Award is very meaningful for me because it is a confirmation of my principles of teaching. It is a UT System-wide award with many excellent educators, so it is rewarding to see that what I personally thought were important principles of teaching get validated at such a high level.”
Ishak-Boushaki joined UT Dallas’s Department of Physics in 2005.
“In my view, two things are very important for successful teaching: The first is to inspire students by revealing to them the beauty and magic of sciences. If I succeed in making them like something or in inspiring them, then they will work very hard and thrive to be successful with no pushing from my side. And that’s valid across the board – graduate and undergraduate students alike. It becomes a joy for all of us!
“The second is to care for students. When you do this, you get ideas, you get energy, and you give the time they need to learn and to develop. Because that’s what it takes.
“These two principals guide my teaching. I think they prove to be very important for students. Students are very smart, very clever. They know if a teacher cares for them. If so, they will do their best,” Ishak-Boushaki said in a recent video interview conducted by the School of Natural Sciences & Mathematics.
The award, presented annually since 2008, comes with a medallion, a certificate and $25,000. UT Dallas had two recipients this year – the other is Dr. Salena Brody, professor of instruction in psychology in the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
In previous years, Ishak-Boushaki received several UT Dallas teaching awards, including the 2021 President’s Teaching Excellence Award in Graduate/Professional Instruction. In 2007 and 2018, he received the Outstanding Teacher Award from the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics.
As a cosmologist, Ishak-Boushaki conducts research “at the intersection of modern cosmology and general relativity.” He studies the large-scale Universe with an emphasis on the mechanics of how the Universe operates and evolves.
Right now, his team of researchers are trying to determine why the Universe is expanding in an accelerating way, a puzzle that places the work of 20th century genius Albert Einstein front and center.
That the Universe is expanding contradicts Einstein’s initial thought – that the Universe is static or at equilibrium, neither expanding nor contracting. Einstein included a term in equations of his general theory of relativity to allow for a static universe, which was the prevailing thought at the time.
They are investigating whether the acceleration is caused by dark energy or by modifications to gravity (i.e., General Relativity of Einstein).
Ishak-Boushaki was one of the first cosmologists to suggest that these two questions may be intertwined. In a seminal article he led and published with collaborators from Princeton in 2006, a new area of research in the field was opened.
Ishak-Boushaki said he sees no difference between teaching and research and excels in both, a quality that was acknowledged recently by the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS) which elected him fellow in 2021.
Past Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award winners from the School of Natural Sciences & Mathematics include Senior Lecturer Amandeep Sra, biological sciences (2019); Associate Professor Gregg Dieckmann, chemistry and biochemistry (2018); and Associate Professor Mieczyslaw Dabkowski, mathematical sciences (2017).
The 2022 Regents Teaching Awards will be presented virtually in November.
Help us leave the planet a better place for future generations. Your support for the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics funds scientific discoveries with real-world applications, student and faculty recruitment, and academic scholarships.