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Bear Peak

Alex T. Balsells

cito@rice.edu





Me!

About me

I am a fifth year PhD student in the department of Computational Applied Mathematics and Operations Research at Rice University. Prior to pursuing my PhD, I spent a year working in the Quantitative Imaging Lab at National Jewish Health in Denver, CO.

Prior, I completed a BS/MS program in Pure Mathematics at Case Western Reserve University in May 2019. At CWRU I wrote my Master's Thesis on Computational Methods for Radiation Therapy Planning advised by Dr. Erkki Somersalo.

I was born and raised in Boulder, CO which instilled in me a passion for the great outdoors. You can likely find me running along the trails of Memorial Park or recharging among the trees at Lake Houston Wilderness Park.





My Research

My research interests broadly lie in the intersection between medicine and mathematics. At the moment, I am researching interactive image segmentation techniques which rely upon convolutional neural networks. Specifically, I am investigating click-based models to segment whole tumors from 3D MRI brain scans.

I am advised by Dr. Riviere in the department of Computational Applied Mathematics and Operations Research at Rice University and Dr. Fuentes in the department of Imaging Physics at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. Additionally, I am supported by a training fellowship from the Keck Center of the Gulf Coast Consortia, on the Training Program in Biomedical Informatics, National Library of Medicine, PI Lydia Kavraki, grant number: T15LM007093-30.

Previously, while at the QIL, I was primarily exposed to chest CT scans. One project I assisted in was to train a novel model to segment mouse micro CT scans.