Blog posts

2026

Week in review: Vectorization, numerical stability, and biological accuracy

3 minute read

Published:

Modernizing eight research codebases at once sounds like a terrible idea, and some weeks it feels like one. But working across optics, biophysics, robotics, and geostatistics in parallel has surfaced a pattern: the same three engineering challenges keep showing up in every domain, wearing different clothes.

The first SOFI implementation in Chile, modernized

2 minute read

Published:

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.

2025

Building a crusher wear management platform from scratch

2 minute read

Published:

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.