I am a theoretical physicist turned into a multidisciplinary scientist. Curiosity and the love for mathematical methods has brought me to work on very different topics, from which I take inspiration for my classes. Current topics of research are related to malaria, cancer, bones, and gene expression. In the past I have been working on theoretical particle physics, ecology and evolutionary modeling, physical chemistry, theoretical biophysics, network theory.
From early on, I have been also teaching. I always taught out of my personal inspiration and only topics I was interested in. Indeed, my job as a researcher does not include any compulsory teaching. The reason why I am teaching is that I like it, it is a very interesting form of learning and focusing on topics of my own interest. I taught mostly about stochastic modeling, which is a very flexible and fascinating mathematical methodology strongly related to statistical physics.
Now my current focus in teaching is applied statistics. The reason I like this topic is that it merges both the theoretical part of understanding the role of randomness, the mathematical treatment of the randomness, and the experimental detail that starts ideally with the design of an experiment.
For the way my brain is wired up, I tend to focus on the mathematics behind the methods. But I understand that when teaching, it is good to leave many details away and focus on intuition. People interested in the mathematical details will have to go through the books one step at a time.
I teach statistics classes at professional level within the scope of my job. There, the people attending the courses have already some previous knowledge and they have also some application in mind. The courses offered here, instead, are not a replacement and not a copy of those provided at the professional level. Here, I try to catch those people who have no time during the week and people who just want to start looking into the matter either out of curiosity, or personal culture or to just start before going into a professional course type.