Incoming American academic Stefora César Alberi will pursue a PhD in biotechnology in computer vision, with the aim of making microscopes smarter and faster.

My research is motivated by Haitian families affected by the 2010 cholera epidemic and currently facing a malaria epidemic. I believe that computer vision can accelerate infectious disease diagnosis and drug discovery in vulnerable countries in the Global South.

Stefora Cesar Alberi

Stefora Cesar Alberi [2026] She always wanted to use her computer skills to help people, and it wasn’t until she discovered computer vision that she knew the perfect place to do it.

computer vision is A field of AI that uses deep learning and convolutional neural networks to enable machines to interpret and analyze visual data such as images and videos, detect patterns, recognize objects, and make informed decisions. “That surprised me,” Stefora says.

Fascinated by this, I worked on Estonia’s space rover project, which led to my PhD at the University of Cambridge, which will begin in the fall.

Her PhD in biotechnology involves the use of computer vision in microscopy. The aim is to enhance microscopic image processing to make it faster and smarter, speeding the discovery of solutions to biomedical problems such as antimicrobial resistance.

Stefora also wants to ensure that computer vision for microscopes is reliable and affordable in the Global South, and hopes that microscopes can be used to diagnose and treat infectious diseases such as malaria and cholera, which are highly prevalent in countries like Haiti, where her family is from.

childhood

Stefora was born on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe and immigrated to the United States when she was three years old. Her family is from Haiti, and when her mother moved to Guadeloupe, her two older sisters remained in Haiti with their grandmother.

Stefora faced many ups and downs in her childhood before moving to Maryland after the 2008 financial crisis. Her father died when she was 6 months old, and her stepfather separated from her mother when she was 10 years old. One of Stefora’s older sisters moved in with the family to help financially, and her mother, a nursing assistant, took extra shifts to help keep the family afloat. Her oldest sister, who had been living in the Dominican Republic since the 2010 Haiti earthquake, was diagnosed with cancer and returned to Haiti for treatment. She died in her early 30s when Stefora was 12 years old, which had a huge impact on the family.

Stefora did not want to cause more problems for her mother, so she focused on her studies. She also helped her stepfather with technology issues at home. She soon realized that she really enjoyed it. “I knew that computers were a safe haven for me,” she says.

undergraduate research

When she finished school, it made sense for her to pursue computer science. However, during her undergraduate studies, salisbury university She started with a cybersecurity class, but found it wasn’t for her. She began exploring AI and became involved in the National Science Foundation’s Undergraduate Research Experience Project on Mathematics Theory as part of a 10-week research experience program.

There, she met people working on deep learning, such as image processing. Algorithms are used to manipulate and enhance digital images to extract critical information for applications such as facial recognition, object detection, and image compression. She had never heard of it before. She was fascinated by deep learning. She asked one of her professors to help her learn more and spent a semester working with Dr. Wang Shuangquan on a project on facial emotion recognition models.

Stefora wanted to take that research further, but the university didn’t have the resources to do so. She first visited her advisor, Dr. Margaret Sebastian, in the university’s TRIO office. We work with first-generation, economically disadvantaged students, and students with disabilities.

They advised Stefora to go to the fellowship office. There she met Dr. Kristen Walton, who helped her secure a study abroad opportunity to Estonia at the University of Tartu, where she took a summer course on cosmic vision. Learn how to apply various image processing techniques to autonomous systems. Stefora immediately knew this was the field for her. “It seemed like it had a lot of potential,” she says. She learned about the various computer vision techniques that were being applied to Estonia’s first lunar rover. “I learned about optics, machine learning, deep learning, etc. and attended various workshops. Everything was amazing,” she says.

computer vision

She approached Quazi Saimoon Islam, the CEO of the KuupKulgur project she was working on, and asked if she could come back as a research intern working on computer vision. He said yes if she could get funding, so she spent the next few months researching scholarships. She ultimately won the Boren Scholarship. This scholarship promises recipients: Secure at least one year of national security employment with the U.S. federal government after completing your studies.

In Estonia, Stephora is collaborating with Quazi Saimoon Islam and Ric Dengel to analyze feature detectors and test and experiment with Superpoint. [a framework for interest point detection and description in images] and a literature review. This research will be used to detect various objects encountered by the lunar rover, and the data will be used as a baseline for 3D reconstruction of detected hazards.

At the same time, Stephora is taking classes in everything from digital image processing to neural networks and machine learning for synthetic biology.

She is very excited to be coming to Cambridge and says her mother is very proud of all her achievements. She said she feels the use of computer vision in microscopy is still in its infancy, but has the potential to have a big impact. “Biotechnology departments are increasingly looking for computer scientists to apply computer vision to molecular microbiology and microscopy,” she says.

She added:My research is motivated by Haitian families affected by the 2010 cholera epidemic and currently facing a malaria epidemic. I believe that computer vision can accelerate infectious disease diagnosis and drug discovery in vulnerable countries in the Global South. ”

*Stefora is one of 26 new incoming scholars in the United States. It was announced earlier this month.