Forwarding a message from Frank Coolen, remembering our colleague Brett Houlding.
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Dear friends,
I would like to make the community aware of the sudden and untimely passing away of Brett Houlding on 14 September. Brett completed the MMATH degree at Durham in 2004 and then studied for PhD, it was my pleasure to supervise him. He completed his PhD in 2008 with a thesis entitled 'Sequential decision making with adaptive utility'. Brett made some contributions to imprecision, but in my view his main achievements are in decision theory.
His thesis sets out foundations, theory and methods for sequential Bayesian decision theory where one also learns about ones utilities throughout the process. This aspect of decision theory has received surprisingly little attention, although it is relevant in many scenarios, e.g. should one visit a new restaurant, how serious are possible effects of system failure, what are side effects of new medication? In his thesis, Brett provided the starting points of a nice and powerful theory, with many research challenges remaining.
After completing his PhD, Brett moved to Trinity College Dublin, first as PostDoc researcher and followed by an Assistant Professorship. This was in years of economic downturn in Ireland, with universities strongly affected. With only few colleagues Brett managed to keep an excellent undergraduate programme running, and he also supervised three students to PhD: Donnacha Bolger ('Reliability updating in linear opinion pooling with multiple decision makers', 2016), Shuaiwei Zhou ('Bayesian modelling and analysis of utility-based maintenance for repairable systems', 2017) and Angela McCourt ('Modelling uncertainty and vagueness within recommender systems via nonparametric predictive inference', 2019). He also collaborated successfully on applied statistics projects with external collaborators, which led to a range of high impact publications, in particular in the field of species richness assessment.
About a year ago, Brett moved to an Associate Professor position at University College Cork, also in Ireland, where he looked forward to more research opportunities and a happy family life. I am happy to have known Brett, he was a hard-working, intelligent and nice person who will be greatly missed by all who knew him.
Frank Coolen
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