JGI-UC Merced Interns Share Their 2021 Experiences

During the summer of 2021, 13 interns from UC Merced spent eight weeks working virtually with JGI mentors to investigate rigorous research projects, hone science presentation skills, and participate in professional development enrichment activities.

For some students in the 2021 cohort, this was their first internship experience, while others further along in their academic career enjoyed the chance to develop new skills needed for their PhD research. And for the first time in this program’s history, two interns returned to re-engage with their mentors from the previous year and continue working on their research project!

The JGI-UC Merced internship program was founded in 2014 with the goal of inspiring students to embark on a career in genomics and to help foster a diverse future workforce in science. To learn more about each intern’s experience during their internship, check out their stories, told through print narratives, videos, a podcast episode, and presentations below.

Narratives

“Blurring the Line Between Plasmids and Phages“ Oscar Davalos Mentor: Stephen Nayfach

“Polymorphisms Created by Transposable Elements“ Jacob Espinosa Mentors: Li Lei and Virginia Scarlett

“Evolution of the Mitochondria Internship“ Jimmy Nunez Mentors: Frederik Schulz and Juan C. Villada

“Cross Species Integration of Single Cell Transcriptomes“ Lorenzo Scaturchio Mentors: Margot Bezrutczyk and Ben Cole

Videos

Three of the interns presented at the 2021 JGI Annual Meeting – go here to watch them.

“Exploring and VisualizingP. hallii Mutant Library“ Beryl Arinda Mentors: Matt Mingay and Sharon Greenblum	“Evaluation of Binning Tools for Microbial Eukaryotes in Metagenomes“ Lucia Bazan-Wiliamson Mentors: Igor Grigoriev and Asaf Salamov	“Functional exploration of Phage Impact on Microbial Root“ Cristian Espinosa Mentor: Jonelle Basso
“Cross Species Comparison of Plant Single-cell Transcriptomes of Rice and Arabidopsis Roots“ Maria Mendoza Mentors: Margot Bezrutczyk and Ben Cole	“Making Big Data Metagenomic Clustering Scalable“ Sean Saki Mentors: Zhong Wang and Bryce Foster