Mobility Scholarship in Bergamo, Italy

This year the Graduate School awarded one of the Statistics postgraduate students, Yoana Borisova, a mobility scholarship in order to undertake international research at the University of Bergamo in Italy. Yoana explains:

“The purpose of the visit was to collaborate with Dr. Francesco Finazzi, an expert in statistical emulators for air quality models. Emulators are used to substitute complex, expensive and time-consuming model simulations with simpler approximations. At first, I found it really challenging because not only was I meant to learn new statistical models but start coding in MATLAB. However, by the end of my stay in Bergamo, I became a lot more confident in my skills. I had the opportunity to present a poster on the “Advantages of predicting air pollution using multivariate space-time models” during the TIES 2017 conference based on the work I did while in Bergamo.”

“Bergamo is an amazing town in the lower parts of the Italian Alps. In my mind, whenever I have heard Italy, I had imagined a place like Bergamo: the old town has narrow cobbled streets, the buildings are hundreds of years old and the food is absolutely incredible.”