Felipe Santibañez-Leal

Felipe Santibañez-Leal

he/him

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

Lockdown

less than 1 minute read

Published:

Chile just entered quarantine. The timing is surreal – I defended my PhD barely three months ago, and now the entire world is shutting down. I’m working from home at ALGES, which at least keeps me busy, but the isolation is something else. It feels like I closed one chapter of my life and then the world decided to close the next one for me. The streets are empty, the news is relentless, and nobody knows how long this will last. Strange days.

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The first SOFI implementation in Chile, modernized

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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

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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.