Mustapha Ishak-Boushaki, Ph.D.

Dr. Mustapha Ishak-Boushaki is a professor of physics and astrophysics at the University of Texas at Dallas. He completed his Ph.D. degree with distinction in 2002 at Queen's University in Canada in General Relativity and Cosmology, and received the prestigious fellowship of the Research Council of Canada. After that, he joined Princeton University as a researcher in the fields of cosmology, before joining UT-Dallas as a faculty in 2005, where he has been since.

Dr. Ishak-Boushaki teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in physics, astrophysics and relativity to thousands of students at UT-Dallas. He uses a mixture of traditional and non-traditional teaching approaches employing creative and innovative ideas and in the classroom.

He has also mentored 22 graduate students with 11 toward completion of their PhD and 5 for a Masters. He also mentored 23 undergraduate students and 6 high-school students to research work. He received in 2007 and 2018, the Outstanding Teaching Award from the Natural Sciences and Mathematics School at UT-Dallas, and in 2021, the President's Teaching Excellence Award for Graduate and Professional instruction at UT-Dallas.

Dr. Ishak-Boushaki research work is in cosmology with a particular focus on testing gravity at cosmological scales, cosmic acceleration and gravitational lensing studies. He is author of over 80 published with over 4000 citations. In 2005, he published a seminal article on whether cosmic acceleration is due to some dark energy or a modification to Einstein's General Relativity at Cosmological Scales, which opened a whole area of research. He is a leading member of the Dark Energy Science Collaboration (DESC) of the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), and the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) collaboration. Dr. Ishak-Boushaki is a fellow of the American Association of Advancement of Science (AAAS) and recipient of the Robert S. Hyer Research Award of the Texas Section of the American Physical Society (APS). Ishak-Boushaki was elected in 2021 as Fellow of the American Association of Advancement of Sciences (AAAS) with quote: "For distinguished contributions to the field of theoretical cosmology, particularly for testing modifications to general relativity at cosmological scales, and for sustained excellence in teaching and mentoring of students."

As described in his AAAS Fellow Election quote above, Dr. Ishak-Boushaki sees no dichotomy between research and teaching at all level and excels in both.