I’m from Portugal and began my university studies in Lisbon, where I did an undergraduate degree in Economics at Nova sbe. This was followed by an MPhil, also in Economics, here in Oxford. In my last two summers as a student, I had the opportunity of doing internships in management consulting at McKinsey & Company, first in Angola and later in Portugal, in the aviation and telecom industries, respectively.
After this first period as a student, I worked for a few months as a research assistant doing fieldwork for a development economics project in Mozambique with novafrica, and then as a trainee at the Competition Department of the European Commission in Brussels.
Following this, I took a job as a research assistant at the Department of Economics in Oxford, where I had completed my master’s, doing data analysis for a project seeking to model and understand the rapid urbanisation of many cities in the developing world, with a focus on East Africa. During these two years, my academic interests began to shift and I found myself wishing to expand my knowledge of statistics and dreaming of applications in the natural sciences, particularly the biomedical. I decided to do a second master’s, this time in statistics, to prepare for a PhD in the field.
In 2017, I started an MSc in Statistics with Data Science at the University of Edinburgh. This degree was based at the School of Mathematics but gave me the chance to do the two core graduate courses in machine learning at the School of Informatics, a leading department in this field.
After this second master’s I applied to a few PhD programmes in biostatistics / computational biology / genomics in the UK and was extremely fortunate to be admitted to the amazing Genomic Medicine and Statistics programme in Oxford, which I started in October 2019 and completed in December 2023 under the supervision of Simon Myers.
Following the PhD, I stayed on for a few months as a postdoc with my PhD advisor and then moved to Columbia University to join Molly Przeworski’s group at Columbia University. Unexpectedly, the grant that funded my position was cancelled together with many other grants to Columbia and so I am currently looking for new opportunities.