As a scientist studying science itself, it is inevitable to eventually engage with the US-american approach to science: US universities regularly dominate research rankings according to most, if not all measures, and seem to attract global talent more than any other country. Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) in Atlanta, Georgia, is one great place in the US to do so, because there’s great Economists studying exactly that: Science and Innovation. »

My PhD at AIFMRM allows me to develop skills that are attractive for the job market and sends me travelling around the world. My supervisor Dr Co-Pierre Georg has been extremely supportive and with his help, I successfully applied for a 3-months internship at the Bank of England (BOE) in summer 2017. I was about one year into my PhD and had worked with a contagion algorithm for asset fire-sales. »

I came across the Breakthrough Innovation Challenge competition via an email distributed by the career services. At the time, I was waiting for registration and first semester to begin. I convinced my friends Bridget and Wadzanai – who both hold Masters in Chemical Engineering from UCT - to form a team and work to solve one of the eight challenges. They both agreed and we spent a week going through all eight challenges and in the end, each one of us had to motivate which challenge we should solve. »

In March, together with the Prof Doyne Farmer’s Complexity Economics team at the Institute for New Economic Thinking at the University of Oxford, we organized a workshop on the use of Agent-Based Modelling for Systemic Stress Testing. The workshop was the brainchild of Prof Farmer, a world-renowned expert in the field of Agent-Based Models and our supervisor, Co-Pierre Georg. AIFMRM and UCT provided funding for three PhD students - myself, Esti Kemp and Tina Koziol - to attend the workshop together with Co-Pierre. »