A Successful Year for Student Research

As the Students Pushing INnovation (SPIN) intern program finishes up another semester, their accomplishments and achievements only continue to grow. The SPIN program at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) offers a way for undergraduates to get involved with hands-on, cutting-edge research. They’re embedded with research teams led by the highly experienced NCSA research staff and faculty at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, giving SPIN students an up-close opportunity to learn while working on research.

SPIN interns often speak with pride about their projects, but there are many ways the program prepares students for a future in research. Abhinav Angirekula, who is working on the Quantum Computing Algorithm Development project, was delighted with the variety of opportunities the SPIN program offered. This year, Angirekula participated in the annual Engineering Open House.

“I had a lot of nice conversations with aspiring U. of. I. computer science students about doing research as an undergraduate, and why they should worry less about being ‘smart enough’ to do research in difficult and emerging areas and more about just enjoying the process of learning and failing and meeting people with the same (or sometimes completely different) interests,” said Angirekula.

SPIN student interns helmed this year’s 3rd Annual NCSA Students Research Conference. The conference is a valuable opportunity for students to practice presenting their work in a more formal setting. Landing a conference presentation can be a difficult task – everything from a proposal to preparing a poster is new to many student researchers. The student-led research conference gives student researchers a chance not only to practice and hone their presentation style but also provides them with mentors and advisors who guide them through the process.

“I really enjoyed developing a poster for the work I’m doing as a SPIN intern,” said Arjun Chainani, “as well as the opportunity to refine my technical presentation skills. I’d like to thank the NCSA for providing me with the opportunity to lead such a successful campus event, as well as for all their support during my SPIN internship!”

Supercomputing is at the heart of so much of modern-day innovation, and the NCSA is at the forefront of those developments. The SPIN program gave me a front-seat view to all of that, even giving me the chance to contribute.

–Abhinav Angirekula, student intern, NCSA

SPIN interns do more than present at the conference. This year, two interns, Chainani and Shaan Doshi,  co-chaired the conference, giving them an inside look at how to run a successful conference. “Organizing the conference was a really great experience!” said Chainani. “From coordinating event logistics to connecting with industry panelists, leading this effort really helped me grow my network, deepen my understanding of the structure of academic conferences, and take on a leadership role on campus. I loved the opportunity to connect with NCSA directors and computing professionals, and hearing about their experiences provided valuable insights on future paths in research and industry.”

Chainani has had a busy year in the SPIN program, between co-chairing the conference and working on a research project.

“I’m working with my mentors,” said Chainani, “Professor Gautham Narayan and Amanda Wasserman, to develop a machine-learning anomaly detection system for finding rare, interesting extragalactic explosions (known as transients) from astrophysical surveys, especially the upcoming Legacy Survey of Space and Time. Our system will serve as a middleman between the telescopes and the astronomers studying these objects and will filter through terabytes of data each night to catch anomalous events as they occur, flagging them for more detailed scientific follow-up. I’m looking forward to deploying the system later this year and seeing it in action at the Rubin Observatory in Chile, where it will stream real-time anomaly alerts to thousands of scientists across the world!”

Launched in 2012, SPIN has seen hundreds of interns come through the program. Some who have long ago graduated and moved into successful careers have returned to pay it forward to the future scientists, researchers and specialists in the SPIN program. David Zmick was among the earliest groups of SPIN interns in 2013. Mentored by NCSA’s Colleen Bushell, associate director of the Healthcare Innovation Program Office (HIPO), Zmick worked on a project studying real-time trends on Twitter.

“At the time, the program was brand new and sort of immature,” said Zmick. “This was absolutely fine because most of what I ended up needing to learn at the time was how to structure the research process and how to run the project, which the mentors were very well equipped to help with.”

A significant pro of this setup is that, as students, we really were given a lot of space to explore our ideas. The program was self-directed, and students got out of it what they put in.

–David Zmick, Jump Trading Group

Zmick came back to NCSA this year as one of the industry panelists at the Students Research Conference. After he spent some time speaking with students and mentors, he found the SPIN program had grown from what he remembered.

“These days, the program looks to be much larger and a bit more structured with more domain-specific and focused mentorship, which is probably a good thing,” he said. “SPIN has done a good job retaining the intention of letting students explore, learn about research and learn how to run/present these projects.”

NCSA would like to thank all SPIN interns and congratulate this year’s graduating interns and their mentors, with a special congratulations to Mankeerat Singh Sidhu for winning the 1st place in the 2025 Cozad New Venture Challenge and securing $1.5 million from private investors for his project creating the Tandemn software solution. Sidhu has credited the SPIN program for inspiration in creating the project. The program also wishes to acknowledge the outstanding work of the following interns and mentors:

Outstanding 2024-2025 SPIN Interns

Yash Ejjagiri
DeepDISC Project
Irene Chen
Exploring Quantum Sound and Music
Kajal Patel
Open-Vocabulary Scene Graph Generation
James Zhang
Eye See What You See: 3D Eye-Tracking for Virtual Inspections
Andrew Robinson
Leveraging Human Gut Microbiome Sensors for Development of Personalized Nutrition
Arjun Kiran Chainani
Outstanding Student Leadership
Shaan Doshi
Outstanding Student Leadership

Outstanding 2024-2025 SPIN Mentors and Co-mentors:

Jill Naiman
Volodymyr Kindratenko
Joshua Allen
Angela Lyons
Aiman Soliman
Taras Pogorelov
Xin Liu
Grant Merz
Alaina Kanfer
Darren Adams
Andrew Lytle
Amanda Wasserman
Gautham Narayan

If you’re interested in joining NCSA’s SPIN program, applications open soon for the Academic Year 2025-25 session. Students can find more information and apply for a spot in the program on the SPIN website.