It is very appealing to both participate in a design project directly at a company and follow courses which broaden your knowledge

Lena Filatova

"My Bachelor education in Applied Mathematics took place at the Odessa National University, Ukraine. After that I was interested to explore possibilities abroad and continued with a Master’s in Industrial and Applied Mathematics at the TU/e which was funded by the Talented Students Program scholarship. This education equipped me with theoretical and computer skills which I was eager to apply in the medical domain. That is why I applied to the Biomedical Diagnostics subgroup of the Signal Processing Systems (SPS) group. During the interview, Massimo Mischi and Hans van Assen explained to me a possibility to do a two year PDEng program in Healthcare Systems Design and put me in contact with Marion Matters, who is the program coordinator.

PAPAVER is a collaboration project between the TU/e and the AMC Amsterdam which aims at improving the image analysis methods for the trans-catheter aortic valve implantation procedure. In particular, we work on the cardiac motion extraction algorithms.

It is very appealing that being a PDEng trainee allows both to participate in a design project either by working directly at a company or at TU/e in my case and follow courses which broaden your knowledge of relevant topics such as medical device regulations, entrepreneurship, etc. Working in the SPS group is a great experience due to the fact that my co-workers are very professional and helpful when there is a need to ask for advice or just have a laugh during various social events.

From the cultural perspective, it took a while in my first year here to get used to the Dutch directness which can take a foreigner by surprise in the beginning. Moreover, I was not accustomed to having not so hierarchical interactions with the professors. However, by the end of the first year all these differences became rather natural. To some extent learning Dutch helped in understanding the culture and character of people."