Student Aims to Transform Preventative Health Care

Ramirez envisions her profession as advancing well being by way of illness prevention, however she acknowledges that, as an undergraduate, she continues to be discovering the best way to flip her imaginative and prescient into actuality. A senior finding out biomedical engineering on the Universidad Autónoma de Nuevo León (UANL), in Monterrey, Mexico, she is the founding chair of her faculty’s IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS) pupil department. The coed member’s analysis pursuits in neuroengineering and artificial intelligence are shaping her imaginative and prescient for the way forward for health care.

“I’ve at all times been captivated with expertise and well being,” she says. “Biomedical engineering is giving me a solution to mix these two worlds and work on options that make an actual distinction in individuals’s lives.”

Her rising affect in IEEE coupled along with her tutorial achievements sign a promising, influential profession.

From chemistry to caring

Ramirez was born in Zacatecas, Mexico, identified for its silver mines, agriculture, and powerful cultural delight. From a younger age, she liked science—notably chemistry—and thrived in faculties designated for superior learners.

Her first publicity to the well being care area got here throughout highschool, when she educated as a nursing technician. Her highschool curriculum was organized as a co-op program, which included conventional lessons alternating with internships in nursing. Ramirez interned on the Hospital Universitario Dr. Jose Eleuterio Gonzalez in Monterrey, Mexico.

Alternating between the educational and vocational tracks allowed her to graduate with a diploma and a technical diploma on the similar time. Talking of her early experiences, she says, “I noticed what number of sufferers struggled, not simply with their situations but additionally with the logistics of searching for and coordinating remedy,” she says. “That made me wish to work on the intersection of drugs and innovation.”

Along with her father working as a supplies engineer and her mom as an accountant, she grew up in a household the place technical problem-solving and analytical pondering had been a part of day by day life.

That mix of influences strengthened her choice to pursue engineering as a profession reasonably than the medical area, she says.

Since starting her research at UANL in 2021, Ramirez has targeted on neuroengineering, one among three specializations the varsity gives. She has explored the function artificial intelligence performs in diagnosing and treating situations together with Alzheimer’s disease, depression, epilepsy, and schizophrenia.

Via the IEEE mentoring program, she acquired steerage from world specialists together with a physician from India who helped refine her early AI initiatives.

Her work rapidly advanced from class assignments to initiatives with real-world potential.

“The challenge I’m most enthusiastic about has not been printed, however it primarily consisted of utilizing convolutional neural networks in medical image processing (MRI) and machine learning within the prognosis of neurodegenerative ailments,” she says.

This yr she broadened her scope by attending the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in Atlanta, the place she gained publicity to each industrial and tutorial functions of robotics.

“In Mexico, individuals normally don’t take into consideration their well being till they’re already sick. I wish to deal with utilizing expertise and training to maintain individuals wholesome.”

At present she is an intern at Auna, a well being care community in Latin America. She contributes to bettering the affected person expertise in hospitals throughout Mexico, Colombia, and Peru.

“I design initiatives geared toward bettering the standard of care and making the hospital intervention simpler for sufferers throughout totally different phases: prevention/wellness, prognosis, hospitalization, rehabilitation, and post-discharge follow-up,” She declined to supply particular examples, citing medical confidentiality agreements.

“My internship is about discovering methods to make well being care not simply efficient but additionally extra humane,” she says. “It’s about bettering processes so sufferers really feel cared for—from the second they enter the hospital till they depart.”

Discovering management and function in IEEE

Ramirez based the IEEE EMBS pupil department in 2023. As chair, she represents the department at IEEE Region 9 conferences, the place she advocates for mentorship alternatives and collaboration with different IEEE groups.

Via her involvement, she says, she has gained not solely technical information but additionally important gentle expertise in management, time management, and teamwork.

“IEEE taught me the best way to lead with empathy and the best way to work with individuals from totally different backgrounds,” she says. “It has expanded my imaginative and prescient past Mexico, displaying me challenges and improvements taking place everywhere in the world.”

She says she plans to pursue a grasp’s diploma overseas—probably in public health or AI for medical gadgets—and in the end a Ph.D. Her long-term aim is to launch a enterprise targeted on growing well being care improvements, particularly in illness prevention.

A future constructed on innovation

For Ramirez, bettering well being care means greater than growing cutting-edge expertise. It additionally includes rethinking how individuals perceive and handle their very own well being.

“In Mexico, individuals normally don’t take into consideration their well being till they’re already sick,” she says. “I wish to deal with utilizing expertise and training to maintain individuals wholesome.”

Her imaginative and prescient is as bold as it’s private, rooted in her personal journey from Zacatecas to Monterrey and past.

As her profession advances, she says, she intends to maintain IEEE on the middle of her skilled life.

“In IEEE I’ve discovered a group that challenges me to develop, helps me after I fail, and celebrates after I succeed,” she says. “It’s not nearly engineering; it’s about constructing a greater future, collectively.”