Felipe Santibañez-Leal

Felipe Santibañez-Leal

he/him

I&F Decision Science Assoc. Manager @ Accenture | Applied Scientific Researcher

Personal daily events

2013

The Beginning

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So this is it. I moved from Concepcion to Santiago to start the PhD in Electrical Engineering at Universidad de Chile, funded by the CONICYT scholarship. New city, new lab, new everything. Santiago feels enormous compared to what I’m used to – louder, faster, more of everything. The first meeting with my advisors was a mix of excitement and intimidation. They laid out what the next few years would look like, and honestly, the scope of it felt overwhelming. But there’s also this feeling that I’m exactly where I need to be. The lab is small but the people are sharp, and the problems they’re working on are genuinely interesting. I keep reminding myself that everyone who’s done this felt lost at the beginning. The CONICYT scholarship takes the financial pressure off, which is huge – I can actually focus on the research without worrying about rent. One step at a time.

2012

First SOFI Results

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After weeks of debugging MATLAB code and calibrating the microscope, we got the first SOFI super-resolution images working. Second-order cumulants on quantum dot samples. The resolution improvement is visible — structures that were blurred blobs in the widefield image become distinguishable points in the SOFI reconstruction.

2011

Heidelberg in Santiago

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Started as project coordinator at the Heidelberg Center for Latin America, right here in Santiago. The role is about supporting the first Medical Informatics summer school – a collaboration between Chilean and German universities. It’s my first real taste of project coordination and academic administration, and it’s a lot more logistics than I expected. Organizing schedules, managing international participants, making sure the German professors have everything they need. The connection between Chile and Germany in health informatics is surprisingly strong, and being at the center of that exchange is fascinating. I’m learning how academic projects actually run behind the scenes – the emails, the budgets, the last-minute changes. It’s not glamorous work, but it’s the kind of experience that teaches you how things get done in the real world.

2010

Trapping Light

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Working on the holographic optical tweezers system at CEFOP. The Gerchberg-Saxton algorithm computes the phase mask that the SLM needs to display, and when it works, you can see multiple laser traps forming at the focal plane — each one capable of holding a microscopic particle.