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 how one can flip her imaginative and prescient into actuality. A senior learning 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) scholar department. The scholar member’s analysis pursuits in neuroengineering and artificial intelligence are shaping her imaginative and prescient for the way forward for health care.

“I’ve all the time been obsessed with expertise and well being,” she says. “Biomedical engineering is giving me a technique 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 educational achievements sign a promising, influential profession.

From chemistry to caring

Ramirez was born in Zacatecas, Mexico, recognized 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 skilled as a nursing technician. Her highschool curriculum was organized as a co-op program, which included conventional courses alternating with internships in nursing. Ramirez interned on the Hospital Universitario Dr. Jose Eleuterio Gonzalez in Monterrey, Mexico.

Alternating between the tutorial 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 circumstances but in addition with the logistics of searching for and coordinating remedy,” she says. “That made me need to work on the intersection of drugs and innovation.”

Together 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 every day life.

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

Since starting her research at UANL in 2021, Ramirez has centered on neuroengineering, one in all three specializations the varsity affords. She has explored the position artificial intelligence performs in diagnosing and treating circumstances together with Alzheimer’s disease, depression, epilepsy, and schizophrenia.

By means of the IEEE mentoring program, she obtained steerage from world specialists together with a health care provider from India who helped refine her early AI tasks.

Her work shortly developed from class assignments to tasks with real-world potential.

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

This 12 months 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 educational purposes of robotics.

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

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

“I design tasks aimed toward enhancing the standard of care and making the hospital intervention more practical for sufferers throughout totally different phases: prevention/wellness, analysis, 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 in addition extra humane,” she says. “It’s about enhancing processes so sufferers really feel cared for—from the second they enter the hospital till they go away.”

Discovering management and goal in IEEE

Ramirez based the IEEE EMBS scholar 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.

By means of her involvement, she says, she has gained not solely technical information but in addition crucial delicate abilities in management, time management, and teamwork.

“IEEE taught me how one can lead with empathy and how one can 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 purpose is to launch a enterprise centered on creating well being care improvements, particularly in illness prevention.

A future constructed on innovation

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

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

Her imaginative and prescient is as formidable 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 heart of her skilled life.

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