Some of your work is centered around improving predictions of regular season NFL games. What inspired you to apply mathematics in such a real world context and what do you hope people take away from that work? 

So my original PhD work, it's actually differential topology, pure mathematics, a lot of topology. And then I started working on discrete dynamical systems. [On the] more theoretical side. I was actually teaching a linear algebra course and students kept asking me, “What does it have to do with anything?” “Why do we learn all this?”, so I really wanted to show some nice applications and at the time, this was 2008 [or] 2009. I was teaching about Google PageRank, a linear algebra method Google used when it came out in 98. So that was completely appropriate for the class. It was  an application for my class to show how this theoretical nonsense was actually used, and of course, everyone knows what Google does. I was teaching the mathematics of Google and I became interested in that and curious [about] why it works. How does it work so well? I began to see people using [it] for sports, and then I realized it actually doesn't work very well. That's not what it's designed to do, but we could make modifications to work well. It has been a wonderful experience because as I keep learning about this and doing research, the students are seeing how this is actually done. I got students involved into this project early on. I have had students working with me who are not even math majors. One particular student was an Economics major who worked on a project with me to figure out how to add home field advantage to our predictions? How can you make these predictions better? She is now working as the Head of Analytics at the Colorado Rockies after a path through the NFL… 

Mathematics is widely considered a daunting subject for many people and I’ve read that your department chair describes your lectures as “clear and well-prepared in an enthusiastic and engaging manner.” How do you cultivate enthusiasm in your lessons and do you have any tips for other educators hoping to do the same in their lessons?

I don't like the fact that math gets such a bad rap of being daunting. On one hand, it is good for our majors because when they go on an interview, and they say, “Oh, I'm a math major”, the first reaction of everyone is “Wow, you're so smart, you’re incredible, that's great.” What I try to do in my class, is to show them that what they think is daunting in mathematics, it is just the algebra, the grammar equivalent of mathematics. For instance, I am terrified of English, because I am always unsure of the difference between who and whom. Who knows the difference? Well, someone does, [but] that's grammar. With practice, you get better at that and you understand why sometimes you say whom and sometimes you say whom. We do not reduce English to grammar, we know that there is a lot more about English. What I try to do with the enthusiasm in my math class is to show that yes, there is a technical part to math that no one likes, and I don't like either, but there is so much more than that. I try to show students more examples, to see why it works. Here is an example I talk in class. How does Netflix recommend you what to watch next? How does your feed on your Instagram or Facebook come about? Let's think about that. There's a lot of implementation issues and we could focus on that, but in class I want to talk about ideas. I want students to get out of my class with the enthusiasm for learning about an idea and not [being] bogged down on the implementation. Let’s think about the big picture, the fun part, and later the implementation, which is the daunting bit.

In 2021, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, you and other professors from universities across the South published an article titled “Resources for Supporting Mathematics and Data Science Instructors During COVID-19.” What do you remember from the writing process associated with this and what did you learn from it?

At first it was tough because I had just lost my father in April. Right at the beginning of the pandemic. So my very first reaction was to say, “Absolutely not, I want nothing to do with this COVID.” My dad had passed away [and] I didn't want to think about it. My wife was pregnant at the time. I had no time for this stuff. But then I realized, why not learn about it? I realized we can have something good out of this bad situation here. I was really interested in understanding how infection rates changed over time. We teach silly problems in calculus about salt in a tank of water, how you pour water in and it mixes with [the] with salt inside, then you pour [the] water out, [and see] what happens with the concentration. That same model can be used to see how viruses spread. These systems assume a certain closure and in April 2020 no one was traveling. All of the sudden, we had a way to see these conceptual models in real life. If we can just not think about the awfulness of COVID for a moment, we had an amazing test subject. We can relate this very meaningful, historical event, to the way we teach calculus and statistics. Our idea in this research was to put all this together and teach people that math is accessible even though this is a disaster. There's a learning opportunity here, this is how we can help. This is how the project came about. You learn that everything is a learning opportunity. Sometimes you have to take a little bit of emotion out of it. But even if there are emotions involved, you can still learn from it.   

You have affiliations in a variety of departments including mathematics, Global Latinx Studies, and Mathematical Finance. What do you think this interdisciplinarity has brought to your work and what new avenues do you think it will take you through as you embark on new projects?

This is a reflection of Trinity.  We tell our students they can do many things, they can be involved in many things just as the faculty are. I love mathematics, but I don't just want to do mathematics for myself. The opportunity to be involved in the community [came] when I began in the MAS (Mexico, the Americas and Spain) program, [I] started getting internships for the Latin community. At the time, we were looking at how to help the food bank have better reach across certain organizations. I also started applying my work on rankings to applied projects in biomathematics during Summer research at Trinity.  Later, with the rise of data analytics in Actuarial Science and the need to respond to the financial crisis we created a mathematical finance major that I wanted to be involved with. In the end this is a reflection on how we want to train our students. If we want them to be open to different opportunities, so should the faculty. As we think of the future, there will be a lot more data analytics. I believe I will be teaching more math for data science, more sports analytics in the future. We are definitely open to help more with BAT (Business Analytics and Technology). Where it's going to take me , I don't know yet. Still, I know it will be somewhere with interdisciplinary conversations and a place that I also want my students to be. I hope it is something new and different, something that keeps taking me to places to hear and implement new ideas.