MICCAI 2021 Daily – Thursday

Estefania Hernandez-Martin is a Postdoc Research Associate in the Sanger Lab at the University of California, Irvine in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. More than 100 VERY inspiring interviews with successful Women in Science - in our archive Estefania, tell us about the Sanger Lab. The Sanger Lab started at the University of Southern California. We have a collaboration with the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles, where we get all of our important data. In 2020, we moved to the University of California, Irvine. We are also in collaboration with the Children’s Hospital of Orange County. Orange County is lovely. Can you tell us about your work? Oh wow … [ laughs ] It’s not a surprise question! I’m sure you expected it … OK. My background is in neurobiology. My Bachelor’s degree was in biochemistry and molecular biology. My PhD was in optics and engineering. I know a little bit about different fields. My main field is signal processing. We try to create new tools to get an explanation of how the brain works. Neuroimaging and electrophysiology are my main fields. My PhD was in optical and fMRI, in Spain. In that case, I used a lot of new technology to measure brain functional activity. A lot of time, we were comparing with fMRI. This is used to measure the brain activity through the blood flow. I used this technique to compare with another one, diffuse optical technology, which uses near- infrared light. We do modelling using physics to measure blood flow. In doing my PhD, I used a lot of software and new algorithms to get this information. I compared that with fMRI, magnetic resonance. I also used stimulations to get better responses in the brain. We stimulate the brain. We get a response. We force the brain to create that response. This is one part of my life. 24 DAILY MICCAI Thursday Women in Science