Shortly after joining SAMBa I broke my neck in a bicycle accident. But thanks to the support from the amazing team, I was still able to make a success of my PhD. The SAMBa environment surrounds you with wonderful people and fantastic opportunities.
Before I joined SAMBa, I was at the University of Edinburgh drinking whisky and climbing mountains, somehow ending up with an MMath degree along the way.
My research involved how things spread through networks. This could be anything from viruses in populations to messages on Twitter, though in a more abstract probabilistic way naturally. I’m now a postdoc at the University of Warwick. I got hired to model chicken pox vaccination, but then coronavirus hit so attention rather got turned in that direction instead.
SAMBa not only gave me the mathematical tools to pursue an area of really vital and interesting research, but enabled me to link up with biologists and epidemiologists so I could understand how my research is applied in real systems.
Dr Sam Moore, Lecturer, Lancaster
You get a lot of freedom to choose your research area...and there is a wide range of research areas within the department from which to choose
I had the opportunity to get involved in some international training and capacity building activities with international partners and was able to travel to Brazil and Mongolia to share my knowledge of statistical methods and applications, which was really rewarding.
SAMBa exposes students to a wide range of cutting edge statistical and mathematical research that will be useful to them in their PhD and later career
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
I was able to use the SAMBa training in statistics, to support training workshops in Mexico and in fact took a break from my PhD to take on a statistics teaching assistant role.
The experience and the skill set acquired during my years in SAMBa helped me develop my academic career in a growing inter and trans disciplinary world.
I really valued the experience of being part of a cohort of students in SAMBa, which guaranteed that we were not doing our PhDs in isolation, despite working intensively on independent projects
I joined thinking I wanted to do one type of PhD but ended up doing a completely different one due to the flexibility that was provided in finding/forming a PhD during the masters year
I enjoyed the big portfolio of opportunities I was given, which I believe is an essential property of SAMBa and something which truly makes the programme worth it
The ITTs were invaluable in providing experience in collaborating effectively with others on large projects, understanding and synthesising new information quickly, and liasing with academic leads and commercial partners
