Felipe Santibañez-Leal

Felipe Santibañez-Leal

he/him

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

The Desert

less than 1 minute read

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Working at Minera Centinela in Antofagasta and the Atacama desert is something you have to see in person. Coming from the forests of southern Chile, this is the opposite end of the country in every sense. Dry, vast, and strangely beautiful. The mine itself is massive – you feel small standing next to those trucks. The flight from Santiago to Antofagasta is barely two hours, but it feels like arriving on another planet. Where I grew up everything is green and wet; here, it hasn’t rained in years. The mine camp life takes some getting used to – wake up, bus to site, work, bus back, dinner at the camp cafeteria, sleep, repeat. The food is surprisingly decent though, you can’t complain about that. The dry air hits you immediately; your lips crack, your nose bleeds if you’re not careful. The sunsets out here are unreal though. Not a bad office view.

Material tracking system

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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.