Abdul-Aziz Yakubu

Abdul–Aziz Yakubu (4 April 1958 Yakubu was a professor at Howard University for over 20 years and served as chair of the mathematics department from 2004 to 2014.

Early life and education

Abdul-Aziz Yakubu was born on 4 April 1958 in Accra, the capital city of Ghana. Yakubu said in a 2020 interview with The Network of Minorities in Mathematical Sciences, "Once you have survived a storm you won’t be bothered by the rain."

Career

Yakubu’s first research experience was at North Carolina State University, and his first faculty position was held at Howard University, a historically black research university (HBCU) in Washington, D.C. While at Howard he spent a year as a long-term visitor by participating in “Mathematics in Biology” at the University of Minnesota. The program at the University of Minnesota allowed him to make connections to further his positive contributions to the world, especially his research on infectious diseases in Africa. Two years after his long-term visit, he took a two-year leave from Howard University in 2002 to visit the Department of Statistics and Computational Biology at Cornell University, where he collaborated with Carlos Castillo-Chavez.

Yakubu published his research in several academic journals like the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology, Journal of Mathematical Biology, Mathematical Biosciences, SIAM and Journal of Applied Mathematics. As of November 2022, the editors of the Journal of Biological Dynamics are working on a special issue to be published in remembrance of Yakubu. The special edition will cover topics inspired by or related to Yakubu's work in mathematics and population biology. On 6-7 April 2024, during the Spring Eastern Sectional Meeting at Howard University in Washington, D.C., the American Mathematical Society held a Special Session on the Mathematics of Infectious Diseases in memory of Dr. Yakubu. Over the two days, 19 presentations were made in his honor.

Personal life Though details about his personal life are scarce, when asked his pinnacle private achievement, Abdul-Aziz Yakubu proudly claimed that nothing compared to marrying his beloved wife. Mathematical Approaches For Emerging and Reemerging Infectious Diseases: Models, Methods and Theory, Springer-Verlag, Volume 126, Edited by Carlos Castillo-Chavez with Sally Blower, Pauline van den Driessche, Denise Kirschner and Abdul-Aziz Yakubu (2002)