Tor Kwembe

Tor Anthony Kwembe, a Tiv-American diaspora mathematician, is a professor of mathematics and statistical sciences and a scholar at Jackson State University (JSU) in Jackson, Mississippi, US.

Early life and education

Born in 1955 in Gboko, Nigeria, the prima city of the Tiv people. In 1989, Kwembe graduated from the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) with a PhD in applied mathematics under the guidance of Professor Calixto Pedro Calderón, in 1983, he graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a master's degree in mathematics, and in 1980, he graduated from the University of Calabar in Calabar, Nigeria with a bachelor's degree in mathematics and statistics with honors.

He attended the Tiv Native Education Authority (NEA) Primary School Gboko Central at the tail end of the British Colony and the Mount Saint Michael's Secondary School Aliade, Benue State, Nigeria completing both the fifth and sixth forms. Kwembe's father was Peter Wundu Kwembe, who served Nigeria as an epidemiologist with the Northern Nigerian Tsetse and Trypanosomiasis Research Institute to eradicate malaria, trypanosomiasis, and sleeping sickness diseases caused respectively by mosquitoes and tsetse flies in Nigeria. His mother was Adzuai Margarete Kwembe who tutored him primary school arithmetic while nursing eight of them. Prior to joining JSU, he worked with the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Chicago State University (CSU) in Chicago, Illinois in teaching, research, and various service responsibilities from August 1990 to August 2004 where he rose through the ranks and tenure to full Professor in 1998.

Research work

His early research interests were focused in biomathematics, classical and Harmonic analysis. His current research interest is in the mathematical and statistical methods of Computational Data Enabled Science and Engineering (CDS&E) with emphasis on Big Data Analytics, visualization, and the enabling technologies applied to Artificial Intelligence- Data Centric Machine Learning and Deep learning.

Selected publications

His Research with his Ph.D. adviser, students and collaborators that currently have most citations according to ResearchGate and Semanticscholar are:

• Calderon, C. P., and Kwembe, T. A. (1991). "Modeling Tumor Growth." Mathematical Biosciences Vol. 103, No. 1, pp. 97–114. doi.org/10.1016/0025-5564(91)90093-X.
• Calderon, C. P., and Kwembe, T. A. (1991). "Dispersal Models." Revista de la Union Matematica Argentina Volumen 37, pp. 212– 229.
• Kwembe, T. A. (2001). "Existence and uniqueness of global solutions for the parabolic equation of the bi-harmonic type." Nonlinear Analysis: Theory, Methods & Applications Vol. 47, No. 2, pp. 1321–1332. doi.org/10.1016/S0362-546X (01)00268-1.
• Hu, G., Wang, F., Lu, W., Kwembe, T. A., and Whalin, R. W. (2020). "Cooperative bypassing algorithm for connected and autonomous vehicles in mixed traffic." IET Intelligent Transport Systems Vol. 14, No. 8, pp. 915 – 923.
• Kwembe T.A. (2014)." Computational Analysis for a Mathematical Model of the Mechanics of Aneurysm Development and Rupture." In: Georgakis C., Stokolos A., Urbina W. (eds) Special Functions, Partial Differential Equations, and Harmonic Analysis. Springer Proceedings in Mathematics & Statistics, vol. 108. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10545-1_11