Personal statement

I have a background in Mathematics (M.Sc. and B.Sc.), and I have obtained my PhD in Statistics at the Bernoulli Institute of the University of Groningen (NL). The aim of my PhD was to develop a stochastic framework to describe blood’s cell formation after gene therapy treatments. From September 2022 - January 2025 I was a postdoctoral researcher at the School of Mathematical Sciences of the University of Nottingham (UK), working on mathematical models describing the cardiac electrical activity regulated by ion channels. Since February 2025 I am a Lecturer in Statistics at the Department of Mathematics and Statistics of the University of Strathclyde. My research area is at the interface between mathematical modelling, computational statistics and systems biology. My aim is to develop mathematical models to shed light on various biological processes that are still unclear. To this end, I develop statistical tools to calibrate the parameters of such mathematical models to fit experimental data, whilst accounting for experimental confounders, with the goal of improving model predictions. This process requires understanding which model parameters mainly affect the model output (sensitivity), which parameters can be tuned whilst ensuring model identifiability (uncertainty quantification), and finally their calibration via optimization algorithms.