ECR Symposium 2026: Early Career Researchers Take the Stage
On Friday, July 24, the Las Pataguas Auditorium at UC's San Joaquín Campus became the meeting point for the Early Career Researchers Symposium 2026, a day dedicated entirely to showcasing the work of those in the early stages of their scientific careers within the Millennium Institute iHEALTH.
Organized by the ECR Committee, the day opened with welcome remarks from iHEALTH's alternate director Marcelo Andía and an international plenary talk by Dr. Mauricio Reyes (University of Bern, Switzerland), a pioneer in medical image computing and the clinical translation of AI, who presented "Beyond Performance in Clinical AI in Medical Imaging: Robustness, Reliability and Resilience."
Next, iHEALTH's Gender Committee led a conversation with postdoctoral researchers Evelyn Cueva and Carolina Pacheco about career paths, research lines, and academic development.
The heart of the symposium lay in the 10 ECR oral presentations and 13 Power Pitches, which spanned a broad thematic range: from magnetic resonance simulation—such as Guillermo Sahonero's work on k-TES (k-space Tissue Ensemble Simulation), a method that approximates Bloch simulation at a lower computational cost—to the reliability of saliency maps in 3D brain tumor segmentation, presented by Gabriel Guerra.
Between the two oral presentation sessions and the Power Pitch block, the community had the opportunity to explore research in medical imaging, artificial intelligence applied to health, signal processing, and modeling, reflecting the diversity of approaches that coexist within the institute.
For the ECR Committee, the assessment was highly positive. "We wanted to create a space for iHEALTH's early career researchers, and honestly, they exceeded all our expectations. Seeing the quality of the presentations leaves us very proud of the community we're building," said Matías Ávila, a member of the organizing committee.
Reflecting on the purpose of the initiative, he added: "It was born from a clear idea: to give visibility to early career researchers. We brought together 23 presenters from different disciplines in one space, and the level was tremendous. As a committee, our job was to create the occasion; the rest was all them. We're leaving very happy and already thinking about the next edition."
