I’m a fourth-year DPhil (= PhD) student in Genomic Medicine and Statistics at the University of Oxford. My primary affiliation is with the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics but I spend most of my time at the Department of Statistics. I’m also a Graduate Scholar at Jesus College and my studies are generously funded by the Wellcome Trust.
I’m part of the research group of Prof. Simon Myers, who supervises my main DPhil project, and have as my second supervisor Prof. Pier Francesco Palamara, with whom I have worked on two smaller projects.
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.
Finally, 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 here in Oxford, which I have been doing since 2019.