Dr. Thomas Coleman is the new Dean of Math at Canada's University of Waterloo.  Anyone involved in recruiting for technology or other applied math positions knows about the University of Waterloo: grads from their world renowned Co-op program have been involved in some of the most innovative companies in North America: AliasWavefront, OpenText, RIM, Telus, Tibco...you name it!

With an eye to raising the profile for his faculty and the university in general, Dr. Coleman has partnered with his previous employer, the Cornell Theory Center's Manhattan office to open a storefront in New York City.  HR.com's editor, Martha Watt, recently visited University of Waterloo's ICR (Institute for Computer Research) -Manhattan office at 55 Broad St. to find out what it's all about.

MW:  You were here (in the office) before with Cornell; did University of Waterloo recruit you with an eye to doing something like this?

TC:  Waterloo University recruited me partially because I had a reputation enhancing that university-industry connection and also because I've worked on an international front. Those are two broad areas that the University thought I could bring to Waterloo.  They didn't specifically say: now get us into New York.  But it was consistent with why they were talking to me. 

In fact when I agreed to go to Waterloo, it seemed to me at that point that since I have all these connections in New York--and I know how New York works, to some degree--Waterloo has a lot to offer in many ways, and we should have a presence here.  I initiated this myself.  As the Dean of Mathematics, which is a big faculty at Waterloo, we have a big budget, and I can do it. 

MW:  The IT industry as a whole is looking at a bit of a staffing crisis. Is that another reason why, Waterloo specifically, and others generally are attracted to this sort of marketing?

TC: I think there are several benefits to being in New York, and certainly one of them has to do with students.  There are two aspects to this.   Waterloo has a huge co-op program that defines them, and I think there is some indication that we need more interesting jobs for students.  We do place most of our students, 95% or even more, but some of the students aren't that happy with their job placements.  More interesting, connected, and relevant jobs would help.  I know that in New York there is a lot of interesting activity going on: a lot of companies are centered here, and a lot of the brainwork of companies happens in New York.  One thing I'm trying to do is increase the awareness of Waterloo among companies and hopefully help create more co-op opportunities for students.  So, on one hand I'm trying to get more students into New York to work.  The companies, I think, would be happy with what they get.

On the other hand, we have to work on our enrollments in terms of our programs, particularly in computer science.  There are interesting opportunities for students graduating in Computer Science, and they are increasing, but our enrollments have gone down.  We have to work on how to attract students.  It's a competitive world and we have to get our message out there.  One of our messages is that we are a leading technical university and we have great programs.  We have great students, too.  We want to make sure people are aware of it and you do that partly by doing exciting things, like being in New York, and opening the New York Stock Exchange, as we did in November. 

When technically inclined high school students are thinking, I want to go to a leading technical university to do technical work, or computer science or math sciences, I want Waterloo to be one of the few they think of.  We'll be making some noise here and we'll be hitting the newspapers once in a while with something exciting going on and it raises the awareness. 

MW:  What else are you hoping people will think when they hear that University of Waterloo has a storefront in Manhattan?

TC: The reason we are here because I'm trying to, broadly speaking, enhance the connection of, particularly the Faculty of Math, but Waterloo more generally, with industry.  My experience with Cornell was that once we opened an office in New York, our bandwidth increased by a factor of ten.  Just by the number of companies that you meet, the number of problems that you discuss, the number of people that you know that are in industry, etc. 

New York is the centre of just enormous activity in industry, and if you're interested, as I am, in working on problems that industry cares about.  If you're interested in knowing what their challenges are, you've got to be talking to them.   You've got to be here.  You can't expect them to come up to Waterloo, Ontario for a two hour visit just to explore possible interactions. 

If you have a presence here, and you have a staff here and have faculty coming through, you can much more easily get a company like Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, any of the companies to come in here, spend some time talking to you, figure out what their problems are and what your strengths are.  They learn more about you, you learn more about them.  Hopefully, out of that comes some interaction; possibly a joint project to work on, some research to work on that is relevant to them.  At least we get knowledge about what they care about, or they get knowledge about what our strengths are. 

For example, if we were to convene a workshop on something like quantitative methods for insurance, I'm pretty sure we could arrange one here and get the room full of the right people on fairly short notice.  It could be a two to three hour thing, and then they'd be back to business.  We can do these things in Waterloo, and we do, but we need a longer time to schedule and there is more difficulty getting people in.  They'd have to commit probably two days just to access it.

MW:  So, despite the virtual nature of the technology world, it still helps to be a body in a room?

TC: It's absolutely the case.  My experience is that, especially in the first meeting, it's good to be face to face.  It makes a big difference.  The nice thing about videoconferencing, which we use a lot of, is that it helps later for second, third or fourth meetings; to keep things going, to keep up the connection.  If you have an ongoing research project, it's great.  We can touch base through videoconferencing.  But initially, going to lunch, going to dinner, these things matter. 

MW: Who is the most important person you've spoken to so far?

TC: Senior executives at US-based technology companies. They have greeted the Waterloo presence in Manhattan with great enthusiasm and look forward to working with us on joint initiatives. We are now pursuing joint ventures both in the financial services sector as well as computational medicine/health services.

The idea is to start talking about interactions.  A couple of these companies are interested in both having a research lab or office in Waterloo, but also having some presence or use of our facility here in New York.  In many cases their customer base is in New York, or they want to access New York as well.  If their mission is consistent with ours--their business is the quantitative side of things, if they are doing research on mathematical methods-- they would be potentially good partners to have here.

MW:  From what I know of the Cornell Theory Center, it acts more as a consultancy, using High Performance Computing, or HPC, center at Cornell to solve specific industry problems on a project basis.  Is this how you envision Waterloo's ICR?

TC:  Check back in a year, because the actual form hasn't really been decided yet.  Going out of the gate it's going to be a bit different.  CTC, which I was the director of at Cornell--and I opened this office here--is a very focused centre: different because we were representing the HPC Centre.  In fact, it is almost self-sustaining, so we did have to have a lot of contractual arrangements with industry to run it.  That's their business model.  It's not as broadly based as the effort I'm trying to develop for Waterloo University. 

Here I am trying to connect many of the faculty at Waterloo to this centre: running workshops, giving presentations, talking to companies here; and in many areas: risk analysis, resource planning and allocation for health care industry and airline providers, lots of different applied problems.  The face of those problems are in New York, and I'd like to have those faculty involved.  We will also have staff here to help define problems and help do the follow up and do the work.

MW:  Is the focus exclusively applied math?

TC:  No, it is not.  But that's a good question: are we going to have a focus, or are we looking for just anything?  I don't have a clear answer, but it won't be just math.  I know two areas that we will emphasize: one is financial math; the other is health services and computational medicine.  We have strength in that at Waterloo University, and we have some projects going on.  The New York area is not only a centre for finance; there are also a lot of health services, hospitals and health centers around here.  We will be doing work in those areas and defining some projects and trying to build some connections.

Interestingly though, and we were having some discussions about it this morning, much of our work could be classified as risk analysis, or risk methodologies, both in finance and in health services, so maybe that will be the banner.  Risk analysis could be applied to lots of industries. 

MW:  Would you consider this a breath of fresh air for, perhaps not Universities in general, but for Canadian Universities?

TC:  I don't know if I'd use that term, though it does seem like that to me. University of Waterloo does have a pretty strong, interesting record with industry.  It has spun off lots of successful companies around the area: 22% of all university spin offs in Canada have been associated with the University of Waterloo. 

On the other hand, if you look at the number of joint or collaborative projects going on, certainly in my faculty, with industry, I think it needs beefing up.  There are certainly some American universities where they do a lot of work with industry.  Industry has a problem and they give them a call.  We have the strength and the expertise and the people where we could be in that position as well. 

MW: So, you are hoping to move industry's thinking toward looking at universities as a talent pool to access more directly; not waiting for students to graduate, but a place to access talent as it comes up.

TC:  That's it exactly.   There are industries and companies that are quite familiar with this.  If they are based in the States, they aren't necessarily going to think of Waterloo University in the first pass, but they will contact an MIT or Stanford. They'll say, we have a problem: You have people who may know something about it. Let's get together and work on it.   I want to have Waterloo on that calling list as well. 

However, there are many more industries and companies that think of universities only as training grounds, where to go to recruit.  Of course we are that, and it could be argued that is our first order of business, but it's not our only order of business.  Learning about the problems that industry and organizations are facing is a good thing for the academics, too.  It'll direct research and problem solving, and teams can be put together to solve problems better if they include some of the brains at Waterloo.

MW:  Many people I know, who are now generally Management level, came through the co-op system at Waterloo University.  It was such an innovative concept in the mid-80s when we were all selecting our universities.  It's now more common. 

TC:  Waterloo still has the biggest coop program in the world, and it's still one of the distinguishing marks of the University.  We have more competition; there is no question about it.  Waterloo has to work harder to insure that we have lots of interesting jobs.  Another aspect that I'll be getting to as Dean is international jobs.  I think students should get international exposure.  Why shouldn't a Canadian student spend one work term in Tokyo, or Hong Kong, or New York?

New York will play a role there, but it won't just be here.  We are trying to get a pilot program going in Hong Kong, so that we can have some companies participating and more easily have some students assigned there.  It would be only a small number of students initially, until we work out the kinks, and then we could increase it.

MW:  How will you know that this initiative is a success? 

TC:  Well, I can comment on it, but as I said, it's still pretty early.  Certainly, funding is a situation that we have to deal with.  I would like this to be a centre that generates revenue for research. 

Connected with that, I think it's required that we have one or two major technology partners, like an IBM.  Not only could they help us in terms of identifying companies to work with and problems to work on, but they could also help with our funding situation as well. 

Over the next few months I'll be trying to line up one or two major technology partners, as well as trying to make progress on finding interesting, applied research projects from companies or organizations.  Its not an easy process, because companies don't typically have a well defined problem to just give to you.  They have vague notions of difficulties.  One good thing about being here and having staff here is that we'll be able to talk with them a lot over a short period of time to ferret out the problem, and determine if it's a problem that we can help with

MW:  So, it's really all about the networking?  That's new for math people.

TC:  It is.  But I think there is a growing awareness that math people are valuable out there, not just in technology companies, but in business generally.  What we have to do here is get them in the door to develop those connections.

MW:  Is there anything else you'd like to add?

TC:  I think that University of Waterloo's strength is, and I know I'm speaking as the Dean but it is the Faculty of Mathematics.  It is relatively well known in the world, but could be better known.   Certainly it's the largest centre of research and study for mathematical sciences in the world.  It has an impressive history and a lot of experts in different areas: a very strong computer science department, strength in actuarial science, strength in optimization and combinatorics.  Cryptography is another strength. 

Getting our story out in New York is worthwhile, and it's a different story than Columbia has, or NYU has.  There are great universities around here, but we are also great.  We have our strengths, and some of those are unmatched by the great universities in the States, just because of the way things have evolved.

Dr. Thomas Coleman joined University of Waterloo, Faculty of Mathematics on July 1, 2005.  For more information on University of Waterloo's ICR-Manhattan, please click here. (Contacts are listed at the foot of the article.)