Nathalia is standing in a bright room and is looking thoughtfully into the distance as she folds her arms

ZEISS Stories | Nathalia

Beyond the horizon

Digital Innovations

Nathalia transcends borders because she was born in Brazil, moved to Australia as a teenager and earned her master's in Munich. She now works in Oberkochen, lives in Ulm and loves traveling the world. Staying put is clearly not her thing. She sums it up perfectly: "I love change and new challenges."

Nathalia leans against a modern glass wall, holds a laptop and looks into the distance

Trained for the future

Computers have always fascinated Nathalia because they can be used for so many applications and the technology is constantly developing. She therefore knew from an early age that she wanted to study electrical engineering. For her master's, she set sail for new horizons again. "After visiting Munich, I was certain I wanted to study here. After all, there's no better place to learn about electrical engineering and IT than at a technical university in Germany!" says Nathalia. During her studies, Nathalia focused on machine learning (ML) and its practical applications. And she recognized the potential that AI had for the future. "ML-based algorithms already influence our lives, both in medicine and logistics, but also increasingly in language detection, image recognition and intelligent recommendation systems. And its importance will continue to grow,” Nathalia says confidently.

It's pretty cool to be at the heart of progress and in a position to develop innovative products.

Nathalia Machine Learning Research Scientist

Friendliness from the start

After a visit to ZEISS in Oberkochen, Nathalia also knew who her first employer would be: "I was welcomed with open arms from day one. The friendliness impressed me from the beginning and is still important today." Nathalia has been a member of the Machine Learning team in ZEISS' Corporate Research department ever since. Her work is centered around algorithms. And her team is not tied to one specific product so they get to collaborate with different ZEISS business units. For example, her work involves technologies in ophthalmic optics, medical technology, industrial metrology, microscopy and semiconductor manufacturing technology.

Nathalia sits, types on a laptop and looks at the screen

Constant change

Each of Nathalia's projects is different, both in terms of its objective and in relation to the people and processes. For example, she was one of the experts working on the Pore-FINDER, a quality assurance system that can detect defects in weld joints caused by tiny material pores. Within another project, Nathalia helped to optimize machine learning in quality assurance. She and her team developed innovative tools that enabled ML analysis to be used more accurately and transparently. Nathalia also played a role in creating and presenting the first hands-on workshop for machine learning at ZEISS. In this workshop, attendees learned how to use Corporate Research's machine learning platform for classification and segmentation tasks.

Seeking new horizons

Many of her projects take just a week, while others take several months. Nathalia likes this diversity and says, "I like how varied my role is and how often the challenges and objectives change. I like working on practical products and applications in a motivated team, hand in hand with experienced colleagues who I can learn a lot from. It's pretty cool to be at the heart of progress and in a position to develop innovative products." Sounds like a personal roadmap to the future without much time to stand still.