Friday, February 15, 2008

Sussex[[Matthew Hennessy = goto Trinity.Continue]]

I apologize for the nerdy title for this post. I just thought that the most appropriate way to summarize the message of the post was to use a "Dpi process". Why? Because Matthew Hennessy, my former PhD supervisor and mentor, and the prime mover behind the development of Dpi has recently left my British alma mater, the University of Sussex, and joined the Department of Computer Science at Trinity College Dublin.

The news was unexpected for many of us, even though Matthew had been contemplating a move for a while. A look at the list of academic staff members of the School of Informatics at Sussex tells me that the diaspora of the group of TCS people I shared my Sussex days with, and that Matthew was instrumental in building, is now complete.

I wish Matthew the best of luck for his life and work at Trinity. As for Informatics at Sussex, I am not so sure that they are looking forward to the results of the RAE 2008. I wish them luck too, but they have lost so many truly excellent researchers over the last few years that I feel they may need more than luck, even though they seem to have hired rather well. Time will tell.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

It goes to show how easy it is for universities to destroy strong research groups.

On the positive side, the musical chairs that us academics play in our careers serves to disseminate our knowledge. I hope Dublin will soon be a world center for concurrency theory, and Irish dialects will be heard more often at our conferences.

Luca Aceto said...

It goes to show how easy it is for universities to destroy strong research groups.

Indeed, and Sussex was about to destroy one of the best Chemistry departments in the world. This so upset Nobel prize winner Harry Kroto that he left for the US after a long affiliation with that university.

I agree with you. It would be great if Matthew could do for Dublin what he did for Sussex. The more strong centres of research we have in concurrency theory, the healthier the subject will be.

I wonder if we are going to have CONCUR in Dublin any time soon :-)

Anonymous said...

Luca - it has been a long time since we were there! It is the end of an era seeing Matthew leave. I remember someone saying (probably over a beer) that tax is so high in Ireland people move away to work, and move back to retire!