Felipe Santibañez-Leal

Felipe Santibañez-Leal

he/him

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

One Month Solo

less than 1 minute read

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For a brief window between leaving CODELCO and joining Accenture, I went solo. Independent consulting, just me and my laptop. The project was interesting – clay classification using hyperspectral drone imagery, which is exactly the kind of niche problem I love. The freedom of being your own boss is intoxicating: no meetings about meetings, no corporate overhead, just the work. But the uncertainty is real too. You’re one client away from having nothing. It gave me a new respect for people who do this full-time. A short chapter, but a useful one – sometimes you need to taste independence to appreciate what structure gives you.

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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

2 minute read

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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.