Rate My Professor Colin Fox

Associate Professor Colin Fox serves in the Department of Physics at the University of Otago, where he joined the Electronics research group in 2007 and leads the Inference group. He earned his BSc in Physics and Pure Mathematics and MSc in Physics, specializing in building acoustics, from the University of Auckland while running an electronics design company. Fox completed his PhD at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge University, in the group of Steve Gull, John Skilling, and Ed Jaynes. After his doctorate, he implemented findings at Schlumberger Cambridge Research for 18 months, then held a postdoctoral position in Applied Mathematics at Otago with Vernon Squire. From 1990 to 2007 at the University of Auckland, he grew the Applied Mathematics programme, headed the Acoustics Research Centre for 12 years, conducted sea-ice fieldwork in Antarctica for a dozen seasons, and visited Le Mans France for acoustics, CIMAT Mexico for probability and statistics, Clarkson USA for engineering, Cambridge UK for engineering, and Kuopio Finland for physics. He was seconded twice to Agilent Technologies in Palo Alto and Colorado for product development research.

Fox specializes in computational Bayesian inference, developing fast algorithms like polynomial accelerated and conjugate direction samplers for inverse problems and uncertainty quantification. His research bridges mathematical physics, computational methods, applied mathematics, and statistics, with applications to sensor design, geothermal field calibration, language age determination, and production line inspection. Previously focused on built-environment acoustics, contributing to Barbican Centre London and Michael Fowler Centre Wellington designs, and ocean-wave sea-ice interactions. As Founder Editor of the ASA/SIAM Journal on Uncertainty Quantification, he impacts computational statistics. Key publications include Parker and Fox (2012) 'Sampling Gaussian distributions in Krylov spaces with conjugate gradients'; Kaipio and Fox (2011) 'The Bayesian framework for inverse problems in heat transfer'; Bardsley and Fox (2012) 'An MCMC method for uncertainty quantification in nonnegativity constrained inverse problems'; Cui, Fox, and O'Sullivan (2011) 'Bayesian calibration of a large-scale geothermal reservoir model'; and top-cited works like 'Markov chain Monte Carlo using an approximation' (2005, 475 citations) and 'On the oblique reflexion and transmission of ocean waves at shore fast sea ice' (1994, 461 citations).