STEM

San Diego Supercomputer Center Launches Internship Program for High School Students

• By Leila Meyer
• 03/10/15

The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego is now accepting applications for the 2015 SDSC Research Experience for High School Students (REHS) summer program, which runs from June 22 to August 14 at SDSC.

The program is intended for high school students who are considering a major or minor in computational science when they enter college. Each student may apply for up to two internship opportunities. Those who are accepted into the program will work as part of a multidisciplinary research team in an area of computational research. Internship hours typically range from 15 to 25 hours per week. Last year 60 high school students were selected for the internship program out of a pool of approximately 200 applicants.

Student internship opportunities available this summer include:

• Working with multi-scale simulation software and GPU architectures in biomolecular catalyst research;
• Furthering research of molecules associated with Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases;
• Validating neuronal models on supercomputers;
• Working with programming staff to construct, annotate, test, improve and visualize a metadata catalog for use in the geosciences;
• Working with the Immune Epitope Database (IEDB) and learning about algorithms designed to predict immune epitopes, as well as learning about immunology and pathogen evolution;
• Helping to deploy a large network of sensors, such as temperature sensors, fan tachometers, power meters and intrusion sensors, to collect metrics;
• Developing reliable network and information technology infrastructures;
• Helping develop methods to prepare middle and high school students to use and program current hardware and design future hardware;
• Learning how to effectively communicate and publicize research projects and their results; and
• Assisting in building SDSC's social media presence.

"We enjoy broad support from the SDSC staff, which gives us the ability to provide a diverse selection of internships from year to year," said Ange Mason, education program manager of SDSC, in a prepared statement.

Further information about the 2015 SDSC Research Experience for High School Students summer program can be found on SDSC's site.