Federico Bernuzzi

The course at the University of Leeds attracted me because I had an opportunity to learn about the various epidemiological studies, whilst also learning in depth about statistics. 

My undergraduate degree was Biochemistry with a year in Industry. One skill that struck me through all the various internships was the importance of statistical tools, for example how to generate hypotheses and knowing when to utilise the appropriate test (such as t-test or ANOVA). Realising that I was not confident in this area I decided to pursue this MSc course at the University of Leeds.

Coming from a biochemistry field I thought that the course at times was challenging and stimulating. For example, something that I found particularly difficult was learning how to use the statistical software programmes STATA and in particular R, since I had no previous knowledge of programming. However, the lectures provided a lot of helpful material, in particular, the module ‘Statistical Inference’, for which the assignments consisted of going through texts of code in R in order to get familiar with the language.

After graduation, I started working as a Research Scientist at the Institute of Food Research running clinical trials looking at the effect of glucoraphanin (a compound found in broccoli) on prostate cancer.

In October 2017 I started a PhD in Nutritional Biochemistry (diet and metabolism) at the Quadram Institute of Biosciences. I look forward to the challenges that lie ahead and hoping to utilise these recently acquired statistical skills in order to design meaningful experiments.

Read more about our other recent health data analytics, epidemiology and biostatistics students: