Meet Professor Rose Baker, Emeritus Professor of Statistics, at Salford Business School. Rose is a celebrated Physicist, Mathematician and Statistician who spent 37 years here at the School, later becoming Emeritus Professor of Statistics. Rose had a remarkable career, before retiring in 2014 and continues to conduct interesting and important research, including in sports and healthcare.
How did you get into academia as a career path?
Well, I always wanted to be a research scientist. At school I was mad on chemistry, then at college I switched to theoretical physics.
I spent a year after my PhD (in bubble-chamber physics) teaching and researching in India at I.I.T. Powai, in 1973. On returning to the UK, I got a post at Rutherford Laboratory (RHEL), where we had the UK synchrotron, NIMROD (the mighty hunter of new particles). When it was first switched on, all the lights in Berkshire dimmed. I was then on a series of contracts; when approaching the end, I applied for several posts. I was offered one working on guided missiles at Filton, Bristol, but didn’t really want to make better guided missiles!
So, I came to Salford to be interviewed for a post in the Computing Laboratory as a Statistician. Amazingly, I was accepted. I then became a Computing Officer, but later joined Mathematics as a Lecturer in Maths and Stats, which is when I re-entered academia after India. So, to answer the question, I suppose I got into academia by a sort of random walk. I was a nerd, it was destiny.
Why did you choose to work at the University of Salford?
Back in 1977 when I joined, it was very hard to find information on anything. There was no Google, and even no internet.
Actually, while at RHEL, I passed a room where a crowd surrounded a man bashing away on a keyboard. ‘He’s running a job on a computer in America’ they said excitedly. That was indeed right at the very beginning of the internet. So, I knew very little about Salford University, except that they had offered me a job, and one that meant I could sleep at night. These days, I’m sure people make decisions based on much better information, but luckily it turned out well.
What’s the best thing about being an academic at Salford?
I’m long retired now, but I enjoyed my time at Salford (between 1977- 2014). Salford is a pleasant place to work, with friendly colleagues.
Being an academic also means having some freedom to do research that interests you. And teaching can spark off research ideas.
Can you tell us about any of your career highlights to-date?
I suppose there are two sorts of highlights: external and internal. Getting promoted is one of the first kind. I remember skipping happily along the embankment after the Vice Chancellor back then told me the glad news that I had been awarded a chair in Statistics.
The other kind of highlights are research discoveries that give great satisfaction. I have had a few good ideas in my time; after a very restless night I realised that I had invented a new copula. Research is very satisfying. Great excitement when playing with new ideas, doing the first coding-up, and getting the first results.
What’s your current research focused on?
Over the years I’ve worked on phase-shift analysis (at RHEL), then a variety of topics in operational research and statistics, including maintenance and reliability, finance, medical statistics, epidemiology, meta-analysis, and most recently, statistics in sport. I’ve done a lot of applied research helping medics working on breast cancer, etc.
Currently I’m working with Professor Ian McHale, now of Liverpool University, on rating players, with a ‘dynamic rating system’ like the Elo system, but hopefully improved. We have a long research partnership working on sport, even longer than the Beatles. I mention this, because Ian, a man of many talents, has played in a band in the famous Cavern Club where the Beatles played. We’re also working on the relative-age effect in football.
Do you have any published papers we can read?
Well, I have over 200 published, starting in 1970, with the latest article this year in Mathematics Today, ‘Mathematical modelling of the Matthew effect’. A lot of my work is available on ResearchGate or Academia.edu.
And finally, the all important question, where in Manchester or Salford is best to grab a coffee?
This is the toughest question, because the craze for high-flown and expensive types of coffee is one of many things about the modern world that puzzle me. I have to confess that my favourite type of coffee is instant, with Coffee Mate. Creamy and delicious, but not the healthiest, unfortunately.
Getting older is like travelling in a very slow time-machine; in fact it is exactly that. After 77 years of such travel, I emerge fortunately not into a world of Eloi and Morlocks, but into a world of coffee shops and people standing motionless, entranced by their mobile phones. Where have paper tape and punched-cards gone? Where has the subjunctive gone? What has happened to the art of the apostrophe?
On the plus side, we have the wonderful worldwide web and next day deliveries from Amazon. Oh, and the Higgs boson. So, it’s not all bad. As some sort of answer to the question, I am told that the Old Fire Station is good.