Working as both a Ph.D. student and a lecturer at the Department of Biophysics and Radiation Biology, Ádám Zolcsák also supports the work of the Gastroenterology Group at the Centre for Translational Medicine. He performed outstanding statistical analyses in a remarkably short time. In February, Dr. Ádám Zolcsák was named Best Statistician of the Month.

Ádám Zolcsák graduated as a pharmacist from Semmelweis University and is currently a Ph.D. student at the Department of Biophysics and Radiation Biology. He became interested in statistics during his studies and started to teach it to medical students after graduation. “I was invited to the Centre for Translational Medicine by Dániel Veres, who had already been working as a biostatistician at the Centre. Currently, I support the work of the Gastroenterology Group. This job has many challenges, including proper communication with students. This is crucial, because medical questions need to be approached in a different way from a statistical perspective, and we need to know in advance what we will be able to analyze in the research.”

Dr. Zolcsák is a Ph.D. student as well. He pursues his studies at the Department of Biophysics and Radiation Biology, where he works with an atomic force microscope. This microscope does not use nuclear force, it is actually a very high-resolution scanning probe microscope. With this, nanometre scale deflections can be measured. “In my work, I mainly measure lipid systems and extracellular vesicles with atomic force microscopy. In my Ph.D. research, we add dye molecules into lipid systems, illuminate them, and then examine the oxidative damage of lipids.” Dr. Zolcsák’s Ph.D. topic is linked to pharmacology because there are drugs with effects based on this mode of action. In addition to scientific work, he continues to teach statistics and biophysics to medical students in Hungarian and German.

(Szabó Emese)