Chalkboard Ultra #47 - The Freedom to Work on Your Interests with Professor Frank Coolen

·1 hr 4 min·5 clips

How did Frank Coolen use expert opinions to decide maintenance for a fertilizer plant's critical heat exchanger?

Cassia hosts Professor Frank Coolen on Chalkboard Ultra, a mathematics podcast. Coolen introduces himself as a statistics professor at Durham University's maths department, where he has worked for nearly 32 years. He describes the department's move to a new building during COVID and the evolution of his role from research-focused to administrative duties. Coolen explains his PhD at Eindhoven University of Technology, focusing on expert opinions for decision-making in a fertilizer plant's heat exchanger reliability. He shifted his research to non-parametric predictive inference, using interval probabilities to minimize modeling assumptions. Coolen recounts collaborations, including software reliability with British Telecom and work with his PhD supervisor Paul van der Laan. He discusses teaching experiences, noting that teaching optimization, a new topic, improved his instruction by aligning with student learning. Coolen contrasts the Dutch education system, where students scheduled oral exams when ready, with the UK's fixed deadlines. He shares extracurricular activities, including political youth group involvement and sports like table tennis and running. Coolen details his current administrative role as director of research, preparing for the Research Excellence Framework (REF), which assesses research quality for funding. He explains the REF's pillars: outputs, impact/engagement, and environment, emphasizing the pressure to produce world-leading papers. Coolen reflects on paper ratings, citations, and the long-term impact of mathematical research. The episode concludes with a question from a previous guest about maths with the best plot twist, where Coolen connects his minimal-assumption methods to machine learning relevance.

As heard by us

A thoughtful conversation about academic independence, changing university structures, and statistics finding new momentum in machine learning.

Chalkboard Ultra's conversation with Professor Frank Colen frames academic life as a matter of time, independence, and shifting expectations. Colen, a statistics professor in a maths department for almost 32 years, contrasts today's more prepared university courses with his own…

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Why you'd press play

You get a professor's long view on teaching statistics, adapting to bigger classes and heavier preparation, and watching older statistical ideas find new life in machine learning.

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