Felipe Santibañez-Leal

Felipe Santibañez-Leal

he/him

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

It’s Over

less than 1 minute read

Published:

A few days after the defense and it still doesn’t feel real. I’m Dr. Santibanez now, apparently. The relief is indescribable – years of work, late nights, moments where I genuinely thought I wouldn’t make it. There were personal losses along the way that almost broke the whole thing. But I persisted, and here we are. The defense itself went better than I expected; the committee was rigorous but supportive, and I could tell they respected the work. My family was there and that meant everything. But now there’s this strange emptiness. For years, the PhD was the thing – the goal, the identity, the daily obsession. And now it’s done. What do you do when the thing that defined your days just… ends? I’m sure the answer will come, but right now I’m just going to sit with the relief for a while.

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.