Marta Torres Sánchez, best undergraduate thesis in Telecommunications Systems Engineering in Spain

Adair Garcia

Marta Torres Sánchez, a graduate in Telecommunications Systems Engineering and Business Administration and Management from URJC, has been awarded thanks to the excellence of her Final Degree Project by the Official College of Telecommunications Technical Engineers and the Spanish Association of Graduates and Technical Engineers of Telecommunications, during the XIX COITT Future of Telecommunications Awards, at the Polytechnic University of Madrid.

The award for her final degree project: 'Search for characteristics and techniques of chromatin granule grouping in cells affected by leukemia', directed by David Casillas Pérez and Ángeles Rodríguez de Cara, was awarded during a ceremony attended by numerous teachers from the URJC, including the director of the School of Engineering of Fuenlabrada, Andrés Martínez, to convey their congratulations to Marta.

The work, based on a recent line of research, is pioneering in using Artificial Intelligence to associate chromatin movements without human intervention, making it possible to identify and detect leukemia from earlier stages of the disease. Despite having studied engineering, Marta comments that “engineers play an important role; nowadays, almost everything is data and signals. We are that necessary bridge for technology to truly help save lives.”

Torres has managed to connect seemingly unrelated disciplines due to the need for data processing to improve medical diagnoses; and his main motivation was to demonstrate that “engineering can and should be applied to many fields, such as biomedicine. Real innovation happens at the intersection of different worlds with no apparent connection between them, and the boundaries between disciplines will eventually disappear because, ultimately, everything is information, whether it travels through fiber optics or through the nucleus of a cell.”

Having tackled such a complex final year research project, the most important thing for achieving excellence is patience and determination, and his advice is "that you have to be patient, and, above all, lose your fear of the unknown. You must always look for the real-world application of what you study, because that's what gives meaning to the effort. And you must never lose your curiosity, because that's where talent comes from; curiosity has killed many cats and very few engineers."