ABOUT JOHN RICK

Hey there! My name is John Rick Manzanares. I have been called John Rick, John Wick, John, Rick, and many others but I prefer the name 'John Rick'. I am a Filipino residing in Baguio City, hailed as the Summer Capital of the Philippines and the City of Pines, located in the Central Cordillera of Northern Luzon. I finished high school at the Philippine Science High School - Cordillera Administrative Region Campus. Later on, I earned my Bachelor of Science in Mathematics (2018) and Master of Science in Mathematics (2022) degrees at the University of the Philippines (UP) Baguio. I recently served as a Master of Science Graduate Fellow under the Department of Science and Technology-Science Education Institute's Career Incentive Program (CIP) for the University of the Philippines Marine Science Institute stationed at the Quantification, Identification, Classification, and Mapping of Plastics Pollution (QuICMaPP) Facility in Baguio City. Some of my work involved developing a plastic object detection model and promoting awareness of plastic pollution through citizen science events. I am currently a research assistant at the Institute of Mathematics of the Polish Academy of Sciences (Instytut Matematyczny Polskiej Akademii Nauk) in Warsaw and a doctoral student at the International Environmental Doctoral School at the University of Silesia in Katowice. As a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Fellow in Doctoral Networks for the GAP Project, my research focuses on the comprehensive analysis of images on the microstructure of bones through computational geometry, applied topology, and machine learning.

Throughout my studies, I consider differential geometry as the one (area of interest) that got away. Topological Data Analysis (TDA) caught my attention through my former supervisor, Dr. Paul Samuel Ignacio, and started my master's thesis on quantifying importance of "holes" in data using persistent homology.

Some of my closest friends, like Julia, Matlab, Python, and R, have been with me through thick and thin, helping me solve problems, debug life's challenges, and even run a few simulations when things get complicated. I would be lost without their support... and a little lost in syntax errors!

Feel free to connect with me by sending a message to my email address. You can also reach out to me through Faceboook, Twitter, or Instagram.