Student Aims to Transform Preventative Health Care

Ramirez envisions her profession as advancing well being via illness prevention, however she acknowledges that, as an undergraduate, she remains 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 college’s IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS) scholar 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 keen about expertise and well being,” she says. “Biomedical engineering is giving me a approach to mix these two worlds and work on options that make an actual distinction in individuals’s lives.”

Her rising affect in IEEE coupled together 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 pleasure. From a younger age, she cherished science—significantly 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 educational and vocational tracks allowed her to graduate with a diploma and a technical diploma on the identical time. Talking of her early experiences, she says, “I noticed what number of sufferers struggled, not simply with their situations but in addition with the logistics of looking for and coordinating remedy,” she says. “That made me need 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 considering had been a part of each day life.

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

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

By means of the IEEE mentoring program, she acquired steering from international specialists together with a physician from India who helped refine her early AI tasks.

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

“The undertaking I’m most enthusiastic about has not been revealed, nevertheless it primarily consisted of utilizing convolutional neural networks in medical image processing (MRI) and machine learning within the analysis of neurodegenerative illnesses,” 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 need to deal with utilizing expertise and schooling to maintain individuals wholesome.”

At the moment 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 tasks geared toward bettering the standard of care and making the hospital intervention simpler for sufferers throughout completely different levels: prevention/wellness, analysis, hospitalization, rehabilitation, and post-discharge follow-up,” She declined to offer 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 bettering processes so sufferers really feel cared for—from the second they enter the hospital till they depart.”

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 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 completely different backgrounds,” she says. “It has expanded my imaginative and prescient past Mexico, displaying me challenges and improvements occurring everywhere in the world.”

She says she plans to pursue a grasp’s diploma overseas—doubtlessly in public health or AI for medical units—and in the end a Ph.D. Her long-term aim is to launch a enterprise centered 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 need to deal with utilizing expertise and schooling 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 middle 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.”