Post doc Stefania Salvatore
I am delighted to be able to join the PharmaTox project.
I have a background in statistics and actuarial sciences from the University of Sannio (Italy), and during the latest three years in Norway I have been a PhD fellow at the Norwegian Centre for Addiction Research (SERAF – UiO). My PhD project was part of the Marie Curie Initial Training Network - SEWPROF (www.sewprof-itn.eu) which promoted the innovative research strategy of obtaining epidemiological information on the use of licit and illicit drugs in a community, by looking at the concentration of drug metabolites or parent compounds ended up in the wastewater treatment plant. This novel approach is called wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE).
As statistician my own part of the project has been mostly focused on the improvement of the statistical methodology usually applied to WBE data. I recently submitted my PhD thesis titled “Application of functional data analysis (FDA) to weekly wastewater data” where I explored the possibility and usefulness of applying advanced statistical methods to wastewater data to extract more information on the weekly temporal pattern of drug loads in European cities compared to more traditional statistical methods. The findings showed that using FDA on WBE data extracts detailed information about drug load patterns during the week which are not identified by more traditional statistical methods.
I am engaged in methodology such as functional data analysis, principal component analysis and cluster analysis. I have interests in machine learning, programming and developing statistical tools for genome data analysis.
Besides work, I enjoy practicing different sports such as climbing, biking and hiking.