This summer, the DOE JGI hosted 10 interns who came from a wide range of backgrounds. Many of them spent the summer crunching genomic data at a computer; a few had the opportunity to spend time out in the field, work at the lab bench, and also do some computational analyses at their desks.
As part of the DOE JGI’s efforts to promote diversity and inclusion in the sciences, among the interns were two undergraduate students and two graduate students from UC Merced. Cristhian Gutierrez and Bryan Rangel Alvarez are both California Alliance for Minority Participation (CAMP) students at UC Merced. CAMP is a statewide initiative funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and supports underrepresented minorities in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields. This summer, they worked with Zhong Wang’s and Tanja Woyke’s groups, respectively.
Each of the interns spoke briefly about their time at the JGI at http://bit.ly/JGI15summerinternsvids. Click here to check out photos of the interns.
For this second year of the DOE JGI/University of California, Merced Genomics Distinguished Graduate Internship Program, Susannah Tringe and Axel Visel hosted Imelda Forteza and Sabah Ul-Hasan, respectively.
Also onsite this summer were two U.S. Department of Energy Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internship (SULI) Program students. Sharon Cao worked with Zhong Wang while Karen Tolentino worked with Brachypodium researcher John Vogel.
Other students hosted this summer were:
- Rida Ali, who worked with T.B.K. Reddy on the Genomes OnLine Database;
- Sarah Fruchart, who worked with Matt Blow;
- Sean Bray, who also worked with Zhong Wang’s group on an aspect of the same project assigned to Sharon and Cristhian;
- and, Lizhen Shi, a graduate student conducting independent studies in Zhong Wang’s group.