Felipe Santibañez-Leal

Felipe Santibañez-Leal

he/him

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

New Beginnings at Alaya

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Today was my first real week at Alaya Digital Solutions, leading the analytics teams. It feels strange to step out of the academic bubble and into the world of industry consulting. The pace is completely different – no more waiting months for paper reviews, now it’s deliverables and client calls. The variety is wild though. One day I’m looking at mining data, the next it’s aquaculture, then retail. I’m still figuring out how to context-switch between such different industries, but honestly, it’s refreshing. The office itself is small – a startup vibe, everyone knows everyone, decisions happen fast. After years of carefully designing experiments and waiting for simulation results, now there are clients waiting for answers by Friday. The shock of going from academic research timelines to commercial deadlines is real. You learn to ship things that are good enough instead of obsessing over perfection, which is a lesson I probably needed. Let’s see where this goes.

Mining optimization — one of many industries

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This week’s biggest change wasn’t technical – it was narrative. I restructured six industry portfolio entries to lead with business impact instead of algorithms. The shift reflects a real career evolution: from implementing models to owning their business outcomes.

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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.