Public Biography
Dr. Franklin Krause is an occupational psychologist and the director of the Institute for Occupational Cognitive Health in Baltimore, Maryland, which he has led since its founding in 2018 as a joint initiative of Johns Hopkins University and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.
Dr. Krause received his doctorate in industrial and organizational psychology from Johns Hopkins in 2004 and spent eleven years at NIOSH, where he directed a program on attention fatigue in air traffic control and authored the agency’s 2013 guidance on shift length for personnel “whose errors are not recoverable.” He has described the institute’s mission as “understanding what happens to the human mind when it spends too long thinking about things that aren’t real,” and has acknowledged that this description applies to several other academic disciplines, maintaining that “we’re the only ones who consider it a problem.”
He is the lead author of the institute’s 2025 paper “Unassisted Reasoning Events in Operative Settings: Incidence, Duration and Audible Correlates,” published in the institute’s own Journal of Occupational Cognitive Science, which established the institute’s running count of surgical procedures in which the operating surgeon declined all external decision support for more than forty consecutive minutes. The paper found that such surgeons exhibited a 31 percent increase in audible self-narration and a measurable decline in the willingness to be handed things. The count has grown every year since 2022.
The institute’s 2026 survey of theoretical physicists, which Dr. Krause has described as a study of “the original population,” found that 14 percent had rederived a textbook result in the past year for reasons they described as “not teaching,” and that 3 percent had done so more than fifty times. Dr. Krause regards physicists working alone as the institute’s control group, on the ground that “the surgeons came to this in 2024; the physicists have been doing it since 1687.”
Dr. Krause testifies regularly before congressional subcommittees on workforce matters and is generally the last witness called, a scheduling decision he has described as “the committee’s prerogative and, in its way, a finding.”
Articles
- Surgeon Dismisses Robot Midway Through Operation, Vowing to Finish With ‘Pure Artisanal Thinking’ — characterized thinking as “the oldest tool we have,” eventually improved upon by a committee
- Artisanal Physicist Laments That All the Easy Problems Have Been Solved, Most of Them Before 1930 — described physicists working alone as the institute’s control group since 1687, and placed Dr. Ekelund in, and as, the 3 percent
Articles
- Artisanal Physicist Laments That All the Easy Problems Have Been Solved, Most of Them Before 1930 — “A gallbladder is an easy problem,” Dr. Ekelund said of a Berkeley surgeon who recently removed one by hand. “He had one. I would like to know where he got it.”
- Surgeon Dismisses Robot Midway Through Operation, Vowing to Finish With 'Pure Artisanal Thinking' — The remaining 112 minutes were narrated aloud by Dr. Lindqvist, including several decisions he described as 'not strictly necessary, but mine.'