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
My PhD, which I completed under the supervision of Eike Müller and Ivan Graham, involved developing efficient preconditioners for elliptic PDEs discretised using higher order discontinuous Galerkin methods.
This work was implemented for modern high performance computing architectures and has applications in atmospheric modelling and weather forecasting. This led to later collaboration with the MetOffice and other international software projects. My general mathematical interests lie in numerical analysis, partial differential equations and high performance computing.
During my time as part of SAMBa I took an active role in training others in maths and members of the wider doctoral college community in modern good practice for using and developing software. I contributed to Bath’s Advancing Research Computing and HPC symposia, in addition to the other large national and international conferences as part of my PhD.
I am now a Research Software Engineer in the Department of Mathematics at Imperial College London. My current research combines continuum mechanics code generation frameworks that
are petascale-ready with an outer loop (such as MLMC) in order to develop software simulations capable of fully utilising upcoming exascale computing hardware. I am also an active member of the Firedrake development team.
SAMBa allowed me to meet many potential academic supervisors before committing to a PhD project, whilst simultaneously developing a wide range of mathematical and research skills. I had the opportunity to share my research with SAMBa cohorts, and contribute to wider and varied research through ITTs, which isn’t possible in other PhD programmes. I also had the freedom to
develop my own specialism and decide how that fits into the wider area of statistical applied mathematics.
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, even if they don’t realise it at the time.
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.
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.
(My supervisors) encouraged me to take my own research direction, guided by my interests, and to be involved in the wider community, presenting at and attending a wide range of national and international conferences
I can't imagine studying for my PhD anywhere other than SAMBa
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
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 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
Being part of SAMBa is like being part of a little community: everyone is super supportive and there is always someone to talk to if you need it (usually with cake!).
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
Being a part of SAMBa was a great way to broaden my research interests and to apply this knowledge to cross-displinary problems
