I found the one-on-one reading courses an incredible opportunity to both learn about a topic in detail, and to get to know a potential area and supervisor before starting my PhD

Before moving to Bath for a PhD with SAMBa, I completed my Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in pure mathematics at TU Budapest with an Erasmus semester at KTH Stockholm.

My first year at SAMBa gave me a good picture of what research looks like in applied mathematics and introduced me to several interesting topics in probability, which is my area of research. I found the one-on-one reading courses an incredible opportunity to both learn about a topic in detail, and to get to know a potential area and supervisor before starting my PhD. It is thanks to these reading courses that I chose a topic I truly enjoyed and that I met my supervisors who I found very easy to work with. Another aspect of my first year at Bath, that was both challenging and useful, is that we had to present our work several times: we gave many talks of different lengths to both general and expert audiences. It is also thanks to these talks that I have been getting positive feedback on my presentations later on. The ITTs were also an essential part of the first and later years, that taught us communicating ideas to industrial partners, kept us sharp with lots of programming to do at each event, and showed us the countless opportunities of statistical and applied mathematics.

My PhD project at SAMBa involved branching processes with selection. These are stochastic processes, which we think of as toy models for an evolving population under natural selection. In my final year of PhD I was lucky enough to participate in a branching processes conference in Montreal, where I had the chance to meet and present my work to leading researchers in this area. Although my project was in theoretical probability, our results are interesting for researchers in population genetics as well. This is important for my current position as a postdoc at the University of Vienna, which is still in probability, but with opportunities to consult with biologists. In this new environment it is particularly important to have practice in presenting my work to non-mathematician audience, and I am glad to have gained this practice during my SAMBa training.

In the course of the four years I spent in Bath I enjoyed working on my research project, but of course it would not have been the same without the people around me. SAMBa offers a very supportive environment, and being part of a cohort is a great experience not only in the first year, but later on as well, when we start working on completely different projects, but continue drinking coffee together.