Manuele Leonelli
I was born and raised in a small town in the northwest of Italy called Sanremo, which is famous for its flowers and music festival. I then moved to Genova nearby for my bachelor's degree in math, stats and data management. I’ve always been passionate about mathematics, but going forward, I wanted it to be less abstract and that’s why I chose a degree at the intersection of math and statistics. Later, I moved to the UK for my master's and PhD in statistics and lived in Rio de Janeiro for one year for my post-doctoral. In my free time, I love traveling and experiencing new cultures. I enjoy hiking and walking with my beloved dog; I go everywhere with her and she is my best friend.
“For me, there are two keys to success: perseverance and passion—only by doing what we really love can we achieve success.”
Pursuing a lifelong love for teaching
Manuele Leonelli worked as an assistant professor for three years in Glasgow before coming to IE University, so has an extensive background in academia. In fact, he cannot imagine himself doing anything else. By training, he is a statistician and his research lies at the intersection between statistics, machine learning and operations research.
His life-long love of teaching brought Manuele to IE University. When he was an undergraduate, he gave private tuition for high school students, and now he is challenged every day to find new teaching approaches and teach students from a variety of backgrounds.
To Manuele, applied mathematics is a way to understand the world. It is a framework that allows us to create structured knowledge in real-world problems that would otherwise be too difficult to approach. He considers applied mathematics as key to our future. The complexity of today’s problems, he says, forces us to think critically and mathematically to provide implementable and efficient solutions.
The Bachelor in Applied Mathematics gives students all the mathematical skills to approach the problems of our modern world. It focuses on mathematical techniques such as mathematical modeling to create mathematical abstractions of problems; programming to implement such models on a computer; mathematical optimization to find problems to such solutions; statistics and probability to quantify uncertainty. However, Manuele feels there is an element of fun to these topics, since all these mathematical techniques can be applied to basically any domain of interest to the student— including health, the environment, finance, logistics and psychology.
Manuele’s classes on statistics and mathematics form the basis of many other classes at IE University. Besides a strong mathematical and statistical foundation, Manuele believes this education enables students to solve problems they will encounter in the real world—a useful skill that IE University holds at its core.
To Manuele, there are two keys to success: perseverance and passion. He strongly believes that we can only achieve success by doing what we really love—a belief that has also led him to his rewarding career in teaching. He also lives by the motto that success requires failure, and that working towards success is part of what makes it so rewarding, no matter what success may look like for that individual.
Check out in detail Manuele Leonelli's academic and corporate experience
