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The Summer Training Research Initiative to Support Diversity and Equality (STRIDE) programme is an initiative of Queen Mary aiming to provide opportunities to students from underrepresented groups to engage with a research project. The programme lasts for 8 weeks in the summer months during which the students are also provided with financial support.

This summer the Centre for Probability, Statistics and Data Science hosted Catalina Neascu, a third year undergraduate student who worked under the supervision of Dr. Nicolás Hernández. The project focused on Bayesian Optimisation to identify the most important time segment within an ECG signal for diagnosing heart conditions like ischemia. By focusing on this key time interval, the method aims to improve diagnostic accuracy and boost classification algorithms.

Catalina was excited to share her experience and commented:
"I decided to apply to the summer internship for two main reasons. One is that I really enjoyed working on my undergraduate project and the internship would offer me another opportunity to experience research, and not only, to delve deeper into the research I started with that project. I have also decided to go into a PhD path, and the summer internship offered me an opportunity to see how it is to work on a more "loose" project, compared to my undergraduate dissertation, that could go into multiple directions and presented me with decisions to be made. The internship was challenging in the sense of practical skills, having to apply new techniques and ideas which I have not even come across during my time as undergraduate. I did greatly enjoy the process of trying to implement different theories, working on solving issues that might come up, I even enjoyed when my Python code would crash! Dr. Hernandez made the entire process easier, helping me through any kinks and problems that I could not solve by myself. I really enjoyed my time as a research intern, and it has solidified my inclination for getting a PhD."