In addition, Coleman is the director of WatRISQ,[2] an institute composed of quantitative and computational finance researchers spanning several Faculties at the University of Waterloo.
Coleman earned his PhD from University of Waterloo in 1979 with the dissertation A Superlinear Penalty Function Method to Solve the Nonlinear Programming Problem supervised by Andrew Conn.[3] He followed that up with a two-year postdoctoral appointment in the Applied Mathematics Division at Argonne National Laboratory.
[citation needed] From 1981 to 2005, Coleman was a professor of computer science at Cornell University.
During his tenure as Cornell Theory Center director, Coleman founded and directed a computational finance academic-industry-government venture located at 55 Broad Street in New York, which shaped into Cornell Financial Engineering Manhattan.
[5] Coleman's research is concerned with the design and understanding of practical and efficient numerical algorithms for continuous optimization problems.