Proyectos

La Convención sobre los derechos de las personas con discapacidad establece el respeto a decidir libremente la cantidad de hijos, el periodo intergenésico y el acceso oportuno a la educación reproductiva y de planificación familiar. Sin embargo, la realidad evidencia una serie de obstáculos a los cuales se ven enfrentadas las mujeres con discapacidad en el ejercicio autónomo de la maternidad, ya que existe una representación asexuada y no reproductiva que sustenta el discurso infantilizador respecto de sus derechos reproductivos. Esta visión se complejiza en contextos rurales, donde las oportunidades y el acceso a información y a servicios básicos se ven considerablemente reducidos. Los procesos de maternidad de las mujeres con discapacidad que habitan en contextos rurales de Chile, ha sido un fenómeno precariamente abordado por organismos institucionales y escasamente trabajado en la academia a nivel nacional e internacional. Por este motivo, el objetivo general de esta investigación es: Analizar las experiencias de mujeres con discapacidad en torno a sus procesos de maternidad (gestación, parto y postparto) en contextos rurales de Chile. Los objetivos específicos son: 1)Conocer las trayectorias de vida que permitieron construir las experiencias de las mujeres en torno a su discapacidad y ruralidad; 2)Analizar los significados que las mujeres con discapacidad le otorgan a los procesos de maternidad (gestación, parto y postparto) en el contexto rural; 3)Describir los vínculos entre la comunidad y los procesos de maternidad (gestación, parto y postparto) de las mujeres con discapacidad; 4)Analizar la relación (disputas, facilitadores y desafíos) entre las mujeres con discapacidad y las instituciones (salud, educación, vivienda) en el ejercicio de sus maternidades en el contexto rural; 5)Explorar las vivencias de las mujeres en situación de discapacidad respecto de la emergencia de colectivos reivindicativos de mujeres con discapacidad desde sus experiencias como madres en contextos rurales. Este estudio se encuadra en un diseño cualitativo de investigación con elementos del paradigma fenomenológico feminista y las epistemologías feministas latinoamericanas otorgando una construcción colectiva y situada del conocimiento. La aproximación a las participantes se realizará mediante el contacto con colectivos regionales de mujeres con discapacidad, con oficinas regionales del SENADIS y del Programa Chile Crece Contigo, difusión en redes sociales y a través del muestreo por bola de nieve. Se utilizarán tres técnicas de investigación: entrevista en profundidad (N:24); mapeos corporales (N:15) y grupos de discusión (N:3). Las participantes serán mujeres con discapacidad que hayan vivido un proceso de maternidad y que habiten en zonas rurales de las regiones: Ñuble, Bio-Bio y La Araucanía. Los principios éticos adoptados por la Declaración de Singapur guiarán la ejecución de esta investigación, considerando los criterios de acceso universal acorde a la diversidad de participantes, así mismo, se contará con la revisión y aprobación del Comité de Ética de la Institución Patrocinante. Para el análisis de la información se utilizará la técnica del análisis temático cualitativo. La novedad científica de la propuesta invita a repensar la posición de las mujeres en situación de discapacidad y sus procesos de maternidad en el contexto rural, por ello, los resultados que emanen de este estudio contribuirán a: 1)Conocer la realidad de las mujeres con discapacidad en los contextos rurales; 2) Problematizar el fenómeno de manera reflexiva, crítica y descentralizada; 3)Aportar en los discursos y diálogos colectivos con especial incidencia en la política territorial y nacional; 4)Consideración de protocolos de buen trato en la atención sanitaria; 5)Revisión de programas regionales enfocados en la maternidad y que no consideran la discapacidad y la ruralidad dentro de sus preocupaciones. En esa línea, esta investigación compromete: 1)La entrega del informe final del proyecto a las participantes; 2)Difusión de hallazgos en medios de comunicación regionales; 3)Publicación de 3 artículos científicos (2 WoS y 1 Scopus); 4)Presentación en dos congresos (Universidad de Helsinki y Universidad Austral de Chile) y en dos seminarios de investigación (Universidad de Barcelona y Universidad de Lisboa); 5)Material audiovisual que refleje las experiencias de las mujeres; 6)Material escrito de sistematización de los mapeos corporales junto a las vivencias señaladas en él.

Estudio sobre la consagración normativa y aplicación práctica del refugio en Chile

Landslides are an important landscape forming process, providing the main mechanism for sediment release from slopes to permit transportation through the fluvial system. Thus, in advecting mountain chains, landslides play a key role in allowing the development of a long-term dynamic equilibrium between uplift and erosion, and in reducing slopes to their threshold angle. In doing so, landslides can directly impact humans. Unfortunately, fatalities and material losses caused by landslides concentrate in areas with high degrees of marginalization, which indicates that the most marginalized populations are the most prone to experience the negative effects of landslides. The total landslide death toll in Chile is 1010 between 1928 and 2017, 54% of them in Central Chile (32.5°S – 35°S). A key question for the proposed research is what are the controlling factors affecting the temporal and spatial distribution of landslides in Central Chile (32.5°S-35°S)? The assessment of this question is relevant considering that landslides are an important natural hazard driven mainly by strong earthquakes and heavy rainfall, both triggers present in our country. Chile is one of the most seismically active countries on Earth and strong earthquakes are often associated with a chain of cascading hazards, such as ground shaking, liquefaction, tsunamis, and coseismic landslides. In tectonically-active mountain areas, landslides are also a major cause of fatalities and economic losses during and after great magnitude earthquakes. In fact, in Chile, there are two broad types of earthquake-induced landslides: interplate/megathrust and shallow crustal earthquakes. For example, the Mw 8.8 interplate/megathrust Maule earthquake in 2010 with a rupture length of around 450 km produced more than 1200 landslides widely distributed between 32.5°S and 38°S. On the other hand, current climate trends and future projections show in addition to temperature rise a decrease in winter rainfall, an increase in the frequency of flood events, increased summer rainfall, and a rise in the torrential nature of storms. Indeed, precipitation has been reduced since 2010 in central Chile, with a 20-40% rainfall deficit. This period of 10 consecutive dry years has been called around the region the Mega Drought. All these environmental conditions are correlated with landslide activity in Central Chile. For the more recent example, on 30 January 2021, an intense and short rainfall, accompanied by hail, affected the Central Valley of Chile (34.4°S), producing catastrophic hail-debris flows affecting the local communities. According to official reports issued by the National Emergency Office, these hail-debris flows affected 200 people, leaving one house destroyed, 52 with significant damage, and another 20 with minor damage. In recent years, landslide hazard and susceptibility maps have been developed mainly in metropolitan regions, nevertheless, none of them considered the evaluation of coseismic landslides. On the other hand, the occurrence of rainfall-induced landslides is poorly studied and probably underreported in Central Chile, especially in O’Higgins and Maule regions. The purpose of this project is to identify the main characteristics of landslides that occur in Central Chile (32.5°-35°S), before and during a mega drought condition, in a zone affected by interplate/megathrust and shallow crustal earthquakes. It seeks to improve the understanding of their mechanics, temporal-spatial distribution, and geological controlling factors, obtaining quantifiable inputs for the development of a methodology for landslide hazard assessment that includes coseismic landslides and the effect of megadrought applicable to urban/territorial planning and disaster prevention strategies.

Materia investigada: Biomedicina, enfermedades cardiovasculares, regulación transcripcional.

Materia investigada: Regulación transcripcional, microbiología, metilaciones, cobre.

Materia investigada: Biomedicina, enfermedades cardiovasculares, regulación transcripcional.

Materia investigada: Regulación transcripcional, microbiología, metilaciones, cobre.

One goal is to enhance the methods being currently developed by Espı́ndola (Physics), Krause (Physiology), and Xavier (Biomedical Engineering) for reconstructing capillary networks with ultrasound. The super-resolution is needed for early detection diseases such as cognitive decline, cancer, or liver fibrosis. They perfuse lipid-encapsulated microbubbles as contrast agents and then localize the bubbles in the ultrasound images with the singular value filter. However, that method leaves a non-negligible percentage of bubbles undetected. Here we propose to complement the singular value filter for the detection and tracking of microbubbles with the sophisticated and mathematically sound Mumford-Shah method for image contour detection, which stems from the conceptually-insightful and numerically-robust perspective of the minimization of energies. In the reconstruction of the capillary network from ultrasound, it is impossible to directly distinguish the microbubbles, or even the blood vessels, in each frame separately, due to the attentuation and degradation in this imaging technique. It is essential to take into account the dynamic nature of the problem, distinguishing the slowly-varying signals emitted by the tissue from those emitted by the microbubbles, which flow rapidly, behave nonlinearly, and have a much shorter coherence length. We therefore propose to regard the collection of two-dimensional frames as a single three-dimensional image, where a moving bubble becomes a tubular neighbourhood of a filament, which the Mumford-Shah model is expected to recover. From these filaments, bubbles can be detected and tracked, and the vertical inclinations of theses filaments will yield the microbubbles velocities. From the velocity profiles it is possible to estimate the shear wall stresses (their ‘tangential elastic rigidities’) of the blood vessels, and anomalies in these stresses are commonly good indicators of the presence of specific diseases. A fortunate encounter between mathematics and mechanics led to the observation that the problem of finding the path that the propagation of a crack will follow inside a structure upon loading could be solved with the mathematical theory (the analysis of free-discontinuity problems) developed for the apparently unrelated image segmentation Mumford-Shah model. The variational fracture theory initiated by Francfort and Marigo is by now (20 years after) very well established. The second goal of this proposal is to further develop the ongoing collaboration between Song (Pharmaceutics), Siegel (Pharmaceutics), Sánchez (Numerical analysis), Calderer (Applied mathematics), and the PI on the study of the debonding of polymer gels from rigid substrates (relevant in the design of the synthetic polymers coating the metallic parts of pacemakers and other medical prostheses) from this variational fracture theory perspective. The third main goal is to apply the mathematical analysis of free-discontinuity problems to the modelling of the evolution of the cavity in the block caving technique in underground rock mining. This has been pursued by Ortega, Lecaros, and coworkers from the side of applied mathematics in academia, in collaboration with Gaete from the Geomechanics Research Department at El Teniente, research group to which Gutiérrez and the PI have joined in the last months. We propose to study the seismic activity induced by the fracture of the rock mass due to gravity, following the works in the last decade within the variational fracture theory that incorporate the inertia effects. The final aim is to optimize the injection of water jets for the aminoration of the seismic events near the operation sites. The three research lines are applications of the phase-field regularization by Ambrosio and Tortorelli of the Mumford-Shah free-discontinuity model, a different variant being required in each of the three contexts. The first stage of the implementation is of mathematical modelling and high-level numerical simulation abilities, in which the intuition and first-hand knowledge from the members of the research team that are experts in vascular function, ultrasound imaging, polymer chemistry, and mining geomechanics is translated into particular mathematical concepts and concrete computational methods. This is followed by a stage of calibration and validation, where the full interplay with experiments is required. The product of a robust and validated computational method will constitute then an advancement in the capabilities, available resources, and understanding in each of the applied disciplines.

Our interest in this project is to obtain two-dimensional models for a three-dimensional thin structures involving situations: • Magnetoelastic plates which are heterogeneous and whose heterogeneity occur at a small scale which depends of the thickness of the plate. Depending on energy scaling and the ratio between these two small parameters, different theories can be obtained. • Poroelastic shell containing a viscous fluid. • Quasistatic evolution problems for linearly elastoplastic shell with hardening.

One goal is to enhance the methods being currently developed by Espı́ndola (Physics), Krause (Physiology), and Xavier (Biomedical Engineering) for reconstructing capillary networks with ultrasound. The super-resolution is needed for early detection diseases such as cognitive decline, cancer, or liver fibrosis. They perfuse lipid-encapsulated microbubbles as contrast agents and then localize the bubbles in the ultrasound images with the singular value filter. However, that method leaves a non-negligible percentage of bubbles undetected. Here we propose to complement the singular value filter for the detection and tracking of microbubbles with the sophisticated and mathematically sound Mumford-Shah method for image contour detection, which stems from the conceptually-insightful and numerically-robust perspective of the minimization of energies. In the reconstruction of the capillary network from ultrasound, it is impossible to directly distinguish the microbubbles, or even the blood vessels, in each frame separately, due to the attentuation and degradation in this imaging technique. It is essential to take into account the dynamic nature of the problem, distinguishing the slowly-varying signals emitted by the tissue from those emitted by the microbubbles, which flow rapidly, behave nonlinearly, and have a much shorter coherence length. We therefore propose to regard the collection of two-dimensional frames as a single three-dimensional image, where a moving bubble becomes a tubular neighbourhood of a filament, which the Mumford-Shah model is expected to recover. From these filaments, bubbles can be detected and tracked, and the vertical inclinations of theses filaments will yield the microbubbles velocities. From the velocity profiles it is possible to estimate the shear wall stresses (their ‘tangential elastic rigidities’) of the blood vessels, and anomalies in these stresses are commonly good indicators of the presence of specific diseases. A fortunate encounter between mathematics and mechanics led to the observation that the problem of finding the path that the propagation of a crack will follow inside a structure upon loading could be solved with the mathematical theory (the analysis of free-discontinuity problems) developed for the apparently unrelated image segmentation Mumford-Shah model. The variational fracture theory initiated by Francfort and Marigo is by now (20 years after) very well established. The second goal of this proposal is to further develop the ongoing collaboration between Song (Pharmaceutics), Siegel (Pharmaceutics), Sánchez (Numerical analysis), Calderer (Applied mathematics), and the PI on the study of the debonding of polymer gels from rigid substrates (relevant in the design of the synthetic polymers coating the metallic parts of pacemakers and other medical prostheses) from this variational fracture theory perspective. The third main goal is to apply the mathematical analysis of free-discontinuity problems to the modelling of the evolution of the cavity in the block caving technique in underground rock mining. This has been pursued by Ortega, Lecaros, and coworkers from the side of applied mathematics in academia, in collaboration with Gaete from the Geomechanics Research Department at El Teniente, research group to which Gutiérrez and the PI have joined in the last months. We propose to study the seismic activity induced by the fracture of the rock mass due to gravity, following the works in the last decade within the variational fracture theory that incorporate the inertia effects. The final aim is to optimize the injection of water jets for the aminoration of the seismic events near the operation sites. The three research lines are applications of the phase-field regularization by Ambrosio and Tortorelli of the Mumford-Shah free-discontinuity model, a different variant being required in each of the three contexts. The first stage of the implementation is of mathematical modelling and high-level numerical simulation abilities, in which the intuition and first-hand knowledge from the members of the research team that are experts in vascular function, ultrasound imaging, polymer chemistry, and mining geomechanics is translated into particular mathematical concepts and concrete computational methods. This is followed by a stage of calibration and validation, where the full interplay with experiments is required. The product of a robust and validated computational method will constitute then an advancement in the capabilities, available resources, and understanding in each of the applied disciplines.