Felipe Santibañez-Leal

Felipe Santibañez-Leal

he/him

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

First Weeks at CODELCO

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Started at CODELCO and the scale of everything here is hard to describe. This is the national copper corporation – the biggest copper producer in the world – and you feel it the moment you step on site. Nothing in my university lab prepared me for processes that run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. The challenge now is optimizing something that never stops. You can’t just pause a concentrator plant to test a hypothesis. The security protocols alone took me by surprise – badges, safety inductions, restricted areas. This is a state-owned company and they take it seriously. Going underground for the first time was something else entirely. The darkness, the noise, the sheer weight of rock above you – it changes how you think about the data. Meeting the operations teams was humbling too; these are people who’ve spent decades keeping this machine running, and here I come with my Python scripts. I’m excited and slightly terrified, which I think is a good sign.

The scale of mining operations

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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.