SDSC Announces 2015 Summer Internships for High School Students

Published March 9, 2015

The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego, has announced internship opportunities for its 2015 Research Experience for High School Students (REHS) summer program, which places students into multidisciplinary research teams to help them gain experience in selected areas of computational research.

The eight-week program will be held from June 22 through August 14 at SDSC, concluding with a poster session. Internship hours, which typically range from 15 to 25 hours a week, will be coordinated with SDSC principal investigators and staff who will serve as mentors in the program. This will be the sixth year for the program, which has grown in popularity among students.

“We had a total of 60 high school students out of about 200 applicants enrolled last year, almost twice the number of students from the 2013 REHS program,” said Ange Mason, SDSC’s education program manager. “We enjoy broad support from the SDSC staff, which gives us the ability to provide a diverse selection of internships from year to year, including a new one under which a small team of high school students will help develop methods to prepare middle and high school students to use and program current hardware, and even think of new hardware that we haven’t yet imagined.”

REHS, now in its sixth year, is intended to serve as a stepping stone for students who are considering pursuing a computational science curriculum as a major or minor when they enter college.

“Collectively, our REHS students have a wide diversity of backgrounds and interests in all areas of computational science,” said Mason. “More and more students throughout a wider number of San Diego-area high schools are becoming aware that computational science can be a very viable focus for college as well as a compelling career choice.”

A broad range of student internships are being offered this summer. Subject areas include working with multi-scale simulation software and GPU architectures in the areas of biomolecular catalyst research, or furthering research of molecules associated with Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases. Other opportunities focus on developing web pages, content development, and validating neuronal models on supercomputers as part of SDSC’s Neuroscience Gateways (NSG) project that gives neuroscientists access to high-performance computers via a Web-based portal, and developing reliable network and information technology infrastructures.

Internships will also be offered in the areas of learning how to effectively communicate and publicize research projects and their results, and assisting in building SDSC’s social media presence.

Students may apply for up to two opportunities, which are listed in full here in addition to an application form and registration details. All applications must be submitted via U.S. mail no later than March 13, 2015. Selected applicants will be contacted by SDSC personnel to arrange a personal interview no later than April 13, 2015.

About SDSC
As an Organized Research Unit of UC San Diego, SDSC is considered a leader in data-intensive computing and cyberinfrastructure, providing resources, services, and expertise to the national research community, including industry and academia. Cyberinfrastructure refers to an accessible, integrated network of computer-based resources and expertise, focused on accelerating scientific inquiry and discovery. SDSC supports hundreds of multidisciplinary programs spanning a wide variety of domains, from earth sciences and biology to astrophysics, bioinformatics, and health IT. In 2015 SDSC will debut Comet, a new petascale supercomputer that will join its data-intensive Gordon cluster. SDSC is a partner in XSEDE (eXtreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment), the most advanced collection of integrated digital resources and services in the world.