Felipe Santibañez-Leal

Felipe Santibañez-Leal

he/him

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

The Beginning

less than 1 minute read

Published:

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.

You May Also Enjoy

The first SOFI implementation in Chile, modernized

2 minute read

Published:

In 2012, I started working on Super-resolution Optical Fluctuation Imaging at SCIAN-Lab, Universidad de Chile, collaborating remotely with researchers at the III Physics Institute of the University of Gottingen in Germany. Working across continents and time zones with the Gottingen team was both challenging and exhilarating – SOFI was a relatively new technique at the time, and there was limited local expertise in Chile to draw on. Every implementation decision, from the cumulant computation pipeline to the deconvolution strategy, required careful coordination through emails and video calls, often debugging numerical issues with a six-hour time difference. The goal was to implement SOFI from the ground up – cumulant computation, synthetic quantum dot simulators, deconvolution – and apply it to biological samples. After months of work, we achieved the first successful SOFI super-resolution imaging in Chile, resolving structures below the diffraction limit using nothing more than temporal statistics from blinking fluorescent emitters. The pride of being the first group in Chile to produce these results was immense – it proved that cutting-edge computational optics could be done here, not just in European labs with larger budgets and established traditions in the field. That work contributed to a publication at SPIE Photonics West, presenting the cumulant-based framework and validation results.

Building a crusher wear management platform from scratch

2 minute read

Published:

Over the past few months I have been building an end-to-end software platform for managing crusher liner wear in minerals processing, working as a consultant for a mining equipment services company. It has been one of the most technically demanding projects I have taken on.