Loyola announced the passing of College of Business faculty member and New Orleans native Iris Mack. Mack’s cause of death has not been announced and funeral arrangements will be shared once details are available. Mack recently worked with artificial intelligence and machine learning along with teaching Loyola students.

She was an accomplished alumni of Vassar College and UC-Berkeley . As a research fellow at AT&T Bell Labs, Mack received a patent for her work with Harrison E. Rowe and Ronald V. Schmidt in fiber optics. According to the university’s statement, Mack became the second black woman to receive a doctorate in applied mathematics from Harvard University in 1986. That year she also became the first black woman to teach applied mathematics at the MIT Sloan School of Management.