I am a statistician with a background in biology.
When I first started studying Medical Biology at the University of Duisburg-Essen, I quickly became annoyed with statistics, which was often presented as a way to transform uncertain data into seemingly certain conclusions.
During my own research, I focused on the development and application of Bayesian models in the fields of immunology and virology, which taught me to finally appreciate statistical models as mathematical entities that can be tested and iteratively improved to answer important research questions. This emphasis on model testing and quantifying uncertainty has been a recurring theme throughout my research.
After my PhD, I founded Athenata and joined Paul Bürkner’s lab to assist further development of the BayesFlow framework, an exciting approach to widen the range of models we can compute by utilizing simulation-based, amortized inference.