Every year, the Alcalde flips the script and gives alumni the chance to give their favorite professors an A+. Through nominations from former students, the Texas Ten honors professors who have made a difference in the lives of Longhorns. From the musician who instills the power of music in young children to the engineer who loves to problem solve and the mathematician who is determined to see his students succeed, there is no doubt the 2020 class of the Texas Ten is one deserving bunch.
Ofodike Ezekoye went on to become an expert in combustion and heat transfer, publishing over 200 papers on the subject, but he still manages to sneak bits of philosophy into his hard science classroom nearly every day. No matter which course he’s teaching, Ezekoye likes to remind his students that the real world is complicated. “One of the things that we want to do is reduce any given problems that we’re dealing with to a homework problem,” he says. “The challenge, of course, is trying to identify how to throw out the useless parts, in some sense, less important features of the problem, to reduce it to the thing that you know how to solve. I think in some sense we’re all searching for that.”
