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18 students selected for Blue Waters Student Internship Program


Shodor and the Blue Waters project have selected 18 undergraduate students from across the country to participate in the Blue Waters Student Internship Program for 2017-2018. Interns will learn to apply high-performance computing to problems in science, mathematics, and engineering through the year-long program. Their experience will begin in late May with a two-week Petascale Institute at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA).

Up to 1 percent of the computing capacity of Blue Waters is available for education and workforce development efforts aimed at preparing the next generation of students and teachers to tackle challenges with advanced computing power.

Blue Waters, supported by the National Science Foundation and the University of Illinois, is one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers and the fastest on a university campus. In collaboration with Blue Waters, Shodor and the National Computational Science Institute provide support and content for the internship program and Petascale Institute. Shodor, a national resource for computational science education, is located in Durham, North Carolina, and serves students and educators nationwide.

The 2017-2018 Blue Waters Interns

  • Mone’t Alberts, Boise State University
    Mentor: Eric Jankowski, Boise State University
    Project: Development of Multithreaded Epoxy Simulations
  • David Barto, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
    Mentor: David Bevan, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
    Project: Molecular Modeling of Amyloid Aggregation
  • Valerie Becker, Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville
    Mentor: Edward Ackad, Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville
    Project: Ultra-intense X-ray Laser-Matter Interaction Studies
  • Justus Brown, University of Oklahoma
    Mentor: Zulfiquar Reza, University of Oklahoma
    Project: High-Performance Multi-phase, Multi-component, Subsurface Fluid-Flow Simulator Development using Fluid-Phase Equilibria under Confinement
  • Karen Canas, Hood College
    Mentor: Xinlian Liu, Hood College
    Project: A Science Gateway and Repository of Deep Learning Neural Network Models for Biomedical Image Processing
  • Qihua Chen, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
    Mentor: Diwakar Shukla, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
    Project: Molecular Modeling of Plant Hormone Receptors
  • Xiaodan Du, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
    Mentor: Arif Masud, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
    Project: Modeling of Tsunamis and Breaking Waves and their Impact on Built Infrastructure
  • Benjamin Eckardt, Bates College
    Mentor: Henry Boateng, Bates College
    Project: Kinetic Monte Carlo Study of Crystal Growth
  • Tyler Ewing, University of Nevada at Reno
    Mentor: Sergey Varganov, University of Nevada at Reno
    Project: Understanding Catalytic Hydrogen Oxidation/Reduction in Metal-Sulfur Proteins
  • Jaime Guevara, Boise State University
    Mentor: Eric Jankowski, Boise State University
    Project: Tuning Magnetic Composite Properties with Conductive Polymers
  • Caleb Ji, Washington University
    Mentor: Hong Lin, University of Houston Downtown
    Project: High Performance Data Analytics for Brain State Modeling
  • Nicholas Kellas, California State University, Fullerton
    Mentor: Michael Groves, California State University, Fullerton
    Project: Improving Global Optimization Search Schemes for Quantum Chemical Simulations
  • Wen Rui Liau, University of California, Berkeley
    Mentor: James Demmel, University of California, Berkeley
    Project: Reproducible Basic Linear Algebra Subroutines (ReproBLAS)
  • Caroline MacDonald, Mississippi State University
    Mentor: Andrew Mercer, Mississippi State University
    Project: Tornado Outbreak Modeling Student Experience
  • Drew Marshburn, North Carolina State University
    Mentor: Elena Jakubikova, North Carolina State University
    Project: Computational Screening of Organic Dyes for Photovoltaic Applications
  • Ernie Rivera, University of Puerto Rico Mayaguez Campus
    Mentor: Guillermo Araya, University of Puerto Rico Mayaguez Campus
    Project: Identification of Lagrangian Coherent Structures (LCS) in Accelerating Turbulent Boundary Layers
  • Gage Russell, University of Oklahoma
    Mentor: Zulfiquar Reza, University of Oklahoma
    Project: High-Performance Multi-phase, Multi-component, Subsurface Fluid-Flow Simulator Development using Fluid-Phase Equilibria under Confinement
  • Xavier White, Kean University
    Mentor: David Joiner, Kean University
    Project: Virtual Reality Enabled Multi-user Collaboratory Science Visualization Workspace with HPC Integration
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