Michael Beck, assistant professor, University of Winnipeg

Michael Beck is an assistant professor for data analytics in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Winnipeg (UWinnipeg). Before moving to Canada in 2017, Beck earned his master’s degree in mathematics and doctorate in computer science from the University of Kaiserslautern in Germany. He has held postdoctoral positions at both UWinnipeg and the University of Manitoba (UM) and lives in Winnipeg.

What is the best part about your job?

The best part about my job is that I get to work in a very interdisciplinary field, where people from many different departments come together. I work with physicists, plant scientists and other computer scientists; it’s a very wide spectrum of people. I might talk to a farmer one day and a scientist the next, then sit down to write some code or head into the lab and start building a robot. It’s so diverse. That variety is what makes the work exciting and what makes me happy week by week.

What got you interested in working in computer science?

It was after doing my postdoc at UM when Christopher Henry and Christopher Bidinosti (both professors at UWinnipeg) asked if I could work on a project. They wanted me to build a robot, create a database to hold images and do a number of things I had never done before. When they asked if I could do it, I said I hadn’t done anything like it before, but I was willing to learn, and that was all they wanted.

My journey went from a very theoretical background in mathematics toward real-world problems. Curiosity and not being afraid to try something I wasn’t trained for is what got me into computer science, and the interdisciplinary nature of the work is what made me stay.