MSc Juan Miguel Valverde is conducting his PhD studies in the Genetics and Mechanisms in Translational Medicine Doctoral programme (GenomMed) and is working as an Early Stage Researcher at the Biomedical Image Analysis research group at the A.I.Virtanen Institute, University of Eastern Finland.  Biomedical Image Analysis research group is led by professor Jussi Tohka. The group focuses on identifying brain disorder biomarkers from neuroimaging data, which is an exciting and rapidly growing research area at the intersection of machine learning, biomedical engineering and neuroscience.   

Miguel has a wide international experience studying and working abroad. His background is in computer science, and he finished his bachelor’s degree thesis at the University of Burgos in Spain, during which he as an Erasmus exchange student visited Turku University in Finland for a year. He completed his master’s degree in IT and cognition at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and worked at the Sojo University in Japan as a research assistant before starting his PhD at the University of Eastern Finland. His PhD research focuses on rodent MR image segmentation with deep learning. “I’m developing tools based on AI/deep learning for the automatic segmentation of brain lesions in which every individual pixel needs to be correctly classified”, he describes.   

For a year, Miguel has been co-organizing an online journal club. The purpose of the club is to make machine learning more accessible to practitioners and researchers. For every monthly session, Miguel and the other co-organizers contact and ask researchers to join the journal club and introduce their recent research. “This journal club is an excellent space to learn and discuss with other researchers about recent advances in deep learning”, says Miguel.

J. Miguel Valverde’s webpage: https://delanover.com/

GenomMed Doctoral programme: https://uefconnect.uef.fi/en/group/genommed/ and https://sites.uef.fi/genommed/  

Biomedical Image Analysis research group: https://uefconnect.uef.fi/en/group/biomedical-image-analysis/ 

Journal club MLT __init__: https://github.com/Machine-Learning-Tokyo/__init__