International Day of Women and Girls in Science

The International Day of Women and Girls in Science, celebrated on 11 February, is an opportunity to promote full and equal access to science for women and girls. The challenge is getting more women working in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics). Diversity in research brings in fresh perspectives, talent and creativity.

This Day is a reminder that women and girls play a critical role in science and technology communities and that their participation should be strengthened.

LPI adheres to this initiative and, especially today, highlights the work of its women researchers:

• Carmen Martín Martín. I obtained the BSc and MSc in Biomedical Engineering from Universidad Politécnica de Cataluña and Universidad de Barcelona, respectively. I am currently working at the LPI toward the Ph.D, whose research is related to brain magnetic resonance imaging for the analysis of neural diseases. "“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood”", Marie Curie.

• Elisa Moya Sáez. I received the Bsc and MSc in Telecommunication Engineering at the University of Valladolid, Spain. Then, I joined the LPI in 2017 with a Collaboration Fellowship and now I am working towards my Ph.D. My main research interests are quantitative MRI and synthetic MRI in the brain using Deep Learning. Also, I am very interested in pulse sequence simulation and in the GPGPU world. "“Like what you do, and then you will do your best”", Katherine Johnson.

• Elena Martín González. I obtained my Bsc and MSc in Telecommunication Engineering at the University of Valladolid. Before finishing my MSc I started working at LPI, in the GPGPU field, programming in OpenCL the registration of cardiac cine MRI. I am currently a Ph.D student at LPI, where I am doing research on cardiac MRI registration and reconstruction using Deep Learning. “"Hope and curiosity about the future seemed better than guarantees. The unknown was always so attractive to me...and still is”", Hedy Lamarr.

• Susana Merino Caviedes. I studied Telecommunication Engineering and I received an Advanced Studies Diploma on information technology and communications at the University of Valladolid. I will obtain my Ph.D. degree this year, which I did working at the LPI. My research interests involve developing image processing tools for the analysis and diagnosis of cardiac MRI images, particularly late gadolinium enhancement  cardiac MR images, with focus on partial differential equations and highly accurate numerical schemes using several stencils. “"I didn’t want to just know names of things. I remember really wanting to know how it all worked”", Elizabeth Blackburn.

• Rosa María Menchón Lara. I studied Telecommunication Engineering at Universidad Politécnica de Cartagena (Murcia, Spain), where I also obtain the MSc degree in Information and Communication Technology. Then, I started my research career focused on Medical Image Processing and Machine Learning. Later, I received the Ph.D. degree in 2015. I have been working at LPI as a postdoctoral researcher since 2017. My research is currently focused on reconstruction techniques for dynamic cardiac MRI, efficient image registration and motion estimation algorithms. “"La mujer ocupará en el mundo científico el puesto que le corresponda de acuerdo con su capacidad, y no necesitamos cuotas ni nada de eso”", Margarita Salas.