Frank Staals

Hey everyone. Welcome to my small corner of the internet. I am Frank Staals and I am currently working as an assistant professor in the Department of Information and Computing Sciences at Utrecht University. In the past, I was a PostDoc at MADALGO, Aarhus University. I obtained my PhD at Utrecht University, and I studied Computer Science at the TU Eindhoven.

Research Interests

My main research area is in Computational Geometry, an area that focuses on the development of algorithms dealing with geometric data such as points, lines, and circles. I am particularly interested in problems involving objects that move, geometric data structures, and shortest-paths. My main aim is to develop solutions that provably correct and efficient. Although my work is typically theoretical in nature, I do really like it if problems have a real-world application, for examples in areas such as Geographic Information Science and Visualization. See my research interests page and my list of publications for more information and concrete examples of problems that I worked on.

Personal

I’m a enthusiastic mountainbike racer! I’ve been racing cross-county races for about ten years now, and I spend most of my spare time on the bike. In particular, in weekends I can usually be found racing or training all throughout the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany. Other than that, I like functional and dependently typed programming: How cool is it that you can enforce and prove properties of your program! Consider for example these type-safe Red-Black trees. I even implemented some geometric algorithms in Haskell.

I also have some teaching obligations, which include teaching functional programming and computational geometry

Contact Information