{"id":24590,"date":"2019-10-01T11:00:15","date_gmt":"2019-10-01T16:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.imsa.edu\/acronym\/?p=24590"},"modified":"2019-10-01T05:52:30","modified_gmt":"2019-10-01T10:52:30","slug":"career-pathways-working-to-play-and-giving-back","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.imsa.edu\/acronym\/2019\/10\/01\/career-pathways-working-to-play-and-giving-back\/","title":{"rendered":"Career Pathways: Working to Play and Giving Back"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cPursue your passions.\u201d This is the mantra propagated by college admission counselors, parents, and high school upperclassmen alike when advising others on how to spend a high school career. Yet, even as these formative years provide numerous opportunities for teenagers to discover their future professions, this simple directive holds much greater complexity. How does one identify their passion? Is it necessary, or even beneficial, to commit oneself to a lifelong career? <\/em><\/span>The Acronym <\/em><\/span>aims to provide insight into these questions by examining the academic and career pathways of IMSA alumni and industry experts. Through interviews with leading computer scientists to healthcare innovators alike, we aim to examine how pursuing one\u2019s passions is a dynamic and continuous process that will extend to one\u2019s collegiate years and beyond. <\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

As an Associate Professor of Mathematics at Manhattan College, Angel Pineda has had a career centered around teaching, research, and service. \u201cMathematics has much aesthetic and functional beauty,\u201d he writes on his website. Although he has had a lifelong love for mathematics, he had never imagined his career centering around it when he was young. <\/p>\n

Growing up in Honduras, Pineda spent his high school years attending an international school. As a private, bilingual school with small class sizes and engaged teachers, it opened up the opportunity for him to get a scholarship to Lafayette College in the US. There he intended to earn his undergraduate degree in chemical engineering \u2013 at the time, the highest paying undergraduate major \u2013 before returning to Honduras. However, once in college, Pineda found himself wanting to study mathematics instead. \u201cI liked chemical engineering. But I loved math,\u201d Pineda recalls. \u201c[My parents] told me, \u2018Look, if you come back to Honduras, you won\u2019t be able to have the stable life that you would want if you were a math major. Finish your engineering degree.\u2019 So that\u2019s what I did. And this is very common for people who come from families who have had financial insecurity \u2013 picking a career that will be financially secure for them.\u201d<\/p>\n

While Pineda did graduate Lafayette College with a chemical engineering degree, his time as a graduate student at the University of Arizona ultimately led him down a much different path than what he or his parents had originally intended. \u201cI went to get a PhD in applied mathematics because I was an engineer who loved math,\u201d Pineda says. It was during the first class taught by his advisor that that he was first exposed to the concepts that would inform much of his research later in life. \u201cHe was talking about abstract mathematical things. Like how functions can apply to medical images,\u201d Pineda recalls. \u201cAnd that was combining the world of my parents \u2013 the doctors in Honduras \u2013 with the math that I loved. And that\u2019s the kind of research I\u2019ve been doing ever since.\u201d<\/p>\n

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MRI without IDEAL acquisition (left) vs. MRI with IDEAL acquisition (right). Which image would you want to diagnose a knee injury? MRI with IDEAL acquisition removes jagged edges seen in MRI without IDEAL acquisition<\/p><\/div>\n

As a postdoc at Stanford University, Pineda did indeed continue with this same kind of research \u2013 using math and programming to improve medical imaging. Working with a radiologist, a computer scientist, an electrical engineer, and a physicist, he looked for a way to better separate water and fat on an MRI, so for example, a torn ACL could be seen better by doctors. \u201cSomething in statistics, [the] Cramer-Rao bound, tells you how accurately you can estimate something. So this idea that is abstract in math helped us get the data that would best separate water and fat. And it led to something that people weren\u2019t doing before,\u201d Pineda explains. This discovery ultimately resulted in four patents, the filing of which was paid for by Stanford University. The method, called Iterative Decomposition of Water and Fat with Echo Asymmetry and Least-Squares<\/a> (IDEAL), has now been used by the top three MRI manufactures: GE medical systems, Philips Healthcare, and Siemens. <\/p>\n

In addition to his work with teaching and research, Pineda emphasizes the importance of a third aspect of his job: service. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of talent in the US and around the world that is not developed. If you look at the number of math publications out of Central America per capita compared to the US, it\u2019s a lot less. And so assuming that mathematical talent is uniformly distributed around the world, that just means that people have less access to develop their own ideas and their own talent,\u201d Pineda explains. \u201cThat\u2019s one of the things that I wanted to do… to make [developing mathematical talent] less dependent on just where and to whom you were born.\u201d<\/p>\n

To help narrow this gap, Pineda begun volunteering in Cambodia, where educated citizens had been killed by the communist Khmer Rouge regime during the 1970s. The result was a lack of people with higher education to teach college or graduate school, leaving volunteers from around the world to come teach in a master\u2019s program in mathematics. \u201cWhen I arrived, there was only one math PhD in the country,\u201d Pineda recalls of his time as a volunteer, where he taught a computer-based course in a computer lab that lacked electricity about half of the time. Today, he works with a program that creates scholarships for master\u2019s and PhD students in developing countries. <\/p>\n

To high school students, particularly those IMSA students who love math and science, Pineda breaks what might be a hard truth. \u201c[You have to] learn to write. Learn to communicate even though you love math and science.\u201d For him, writing has become a much larger part of his day to day job than he expected. As a teacher, writing personal statements, teaching statements, and research statements are \u201cthe way you get your foot in the door.\u201d As a researcher, writing grant applications are essential to securing funding for his work, particularly given how hard it can be to get them. \u201cWhen I look at who is successful or not in my world, they were rejected from grants multiple times and they just kept submitting them,\u201d Pineda says. \u201cPeople who are resilient and persistent tend to succeed. If you fail, see it as an opportunity for growth\u2026If you look at life in this way, you\u2019re much more likely to succeed than if you think of challenges as barriers that you have to overcome.\u201d<\/p>\n

But even more importantly, Pineda emphasizes the importance of finding the things that are interesting and exciting to you. \u201cYou have to decide what\u2019s important to you and be deliberate about your decisions,\u201d he advises. \u201cPick the courses that you love. And don\u2019t worry as much about the grades.\u201d For Pineda, this has led to career that he finds incredibly rewarding.  \u201cIt\u2019s like playing for me,\u201d he says of his teaching and research. \u201cI have colleagues or friends who make more money than me, but they typically don\u2019t go to work to play… And once in my career, there [was] something that I played with that ended up in an MRI scanner. And this theoretical thing ended up being something that helped a patient. That\u2019s like a dream come true.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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