In 2009, RCBU member Ben Castaneda successfully defended his PhD thesis, Extracting Information from Sonoelastogrphic Images. He returned to his home country of Peru, where he accepted a new faculty position in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru (PUCP). He was also appointed as the director of a newly created Medical Imaging Research Laboratory. In that capacity, Ben heads PUCP’s new master's degree program in Signal and Digital Image Processing. The program is research oriented, with an emphasis on developing new mathematical models and their application to solving real problems.