{"id":17660,"date":"2021-05-11T12:42:31","date_gmt":"2021-05-11T10:42:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/opentalk.iit.it\/?p=17660"},"modified":"2024-06-18T17:31:06","modified_gmt":"2024-06-18T15:31:06","slug":"international-talks-miguel-angel-casal-santiago","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/opentalk.iit.it\/en\/international-talks-miguel-angel-casal-santiago\/","title":{"rendered":"International Talks: Miguel Angel Casal Santiago"},"content":{"rendered":"<h4><strong>An amazing future to unveil<\/strong><\/h4>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<div>\n<p class=\"Body\"><span lang=\"ES-TRAD\">I was born in Spain in 1996. S<\/span><span lang=\"EN-US\">ince I was a child<\/span><span lang=\"ES-TRAD\"> I aimed at<\/span><span lang=\"EN-US\"> contribut<\/span><span lang=\"ES-TRAD\">ing<\/span><span lang=\"EN-US\"> to make this world a better place for <\/span><span lang=\"ES-TRAD\">living. That led me to study<\/span><span lang=\"EN-US\"> Biomedical Engineering in Barcelona at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, to understand the possible applications of technology to medicine that could improve day-to-day people\u2019s life. During this period, I realized that there are some topics that biology and medicine have not been able to shed light over. One of them is the brain, a complex organ made of billions of electrically active cells, called neurons, that process all the information we receive through the senses to then produce the corresponding suitable actions we finally execute. To achieve a complete and deep understanding about the brain, we need to look at the intersection between biology and medicine with mathematics and physics, which <\/span><span lang=\"ES-TRAD\">drove<\/span><span lang=\"EN-US\"> me to study the memory mechanisms and information processing capabilities of the brain in my Bachelor\u2019s thesis. At this point, I committed myself to learn more about the <\/span><span lang=\"ES-TRAD\">such a complex organ<\/span><span lang=\"EN-US\"> and try to understand it better.<\/span><span style=\"font-size: 1rem;\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<p class=\"Body\"><span lang=\"EN-US\">For this reason, I moved from Spain to Italy to do my PhD in Computational Neuroscience within the Neutouch Project, an <\/span><span lang=\"ES-TRAD\">Innovative Training Network<\/span><span lang=\"EN-US\"> funded by the European <\/span><span lang=\"ES-TRAD\">program Horizon2020<\/span><span lang=\"EN-US\">, with the aim of gaining knowledge about how humans process the information perceived by the tactile sense and how it is used for the behavior we exhibit. This knowledge will have implications in many fields ranging from robotics, to produce more human-like robots that favor interaction, to prosthetics, to create devices that can provide the user with a better feedback about the world surrounding them. Drafting the information flow within the nervous system is not an easy task. We basically address this problem using large scale simulations of the hand mechanoreceptors and <\/span><span lang=\"ES-TRAD\">neural recordings<\/span><span lang=\"EN-US\"> obtained during tactile discrimination tasks, to which we can apply statistical methods and machine learning algorithms that help us to <\/span><span lang=\"ES-TRAD\">answer<\/span><span lang=\"EN-US\"> the aforementioned questions.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<p class=\"Body\"><span lang=\"ES-TRAD\">Since I arrived to Italy, I realized I miss my place and my life in Spain, but I have discovered a new country in which I fit very well, with an amazing life \u2014even considering the pandemic\u2014 full of warm and nice people, pizza and ice cream. <\/span><span lang=\"EN-US\">Italy is full of nice places to visit<\/span><span lang=\"ES-TRAD\">, from Torino and Milano, to Roma and Napoli, going through Firenze and Bologna. I am currently living in Genova, which is a chaotic city, but it is surrounded by many small sea towns that are worthy to visit. You can also spend entire days walking through the <i>forti<\/i> routes to discover nature and wild life, if you do not mind going up and down through the hills. Genova has a very similar weather compared to my hometown as well, so raining in the winter was not a problem for me at all. All this makes me think I will miss Italy at the end of my PhD, but I will always feel I belong to this place.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<p class=\"Body\"><span lang=\"EN-US\">This European program has given me the opportunity to move to a new place, work with top-level scientists and meet new people. Research requires to invest a lot of time on your work, but the results you obtain both in terms of knowledge and final applications is not actually valuable. Additionally, the environment you live in always keeps enriching you, meeting people<\/span> <span lang=\"EN-US\">from all around the world when traveling to conferences, from who you will learn something new.<\/span><span lang=\"ES-TRAD\"> Academia is a good path to contribute to society, learn many new things everyday while having the opportunity to travel, make new friends and enjoy life.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div>\n<p class=\"Body\"><span lang=\"ES-TRAD\">My future is a bit uncertain. I find my career in academia inspiring and exciting, and I feel I would like to carry on with it at least for some years more. However, I also tend to love changing topics and learning about new things from scratch. Who knows if I will end up working in a company or setting up a graphical design studio, but that is the great part, learning as much as you can about all you can find.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An amazing future to unveil<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":17666,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5062,5039],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17660","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international-talks-en","category-news-en"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>International Talks: Miguel Angel Casal Santiago - Talk iit<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/opentalk.iit.it\/en\/international-talks-miguel-angel-casal-santiago\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"International Talks: Miguel Angel Casal Santiago - 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