To complement their thesis research students are expected to participate in an internship program. The goal of this program is to provide the students with supplementary training that will significantly broaden and strengthen their education. For example, students working on theoretical projects might intern in experimental labs, while students working on experimental theses might collaborate on theoretical or computational projects. In other cases the internship could allow the student to master a specific experimental technique or theoretical approach not readily available at Northwestern, but important for the student's thesis research.
Students, together with their advisors, will make the initial contact with the internship host. A brief proposal will then be written that clearly states the goals of the internship. We expect that internships will last 3-6 months. The experience of the hosts chosen for the internship program shows that this length of time is usually sufficient to achieve meaningful results and sometimes even form the basis for a publication. After the first three months the host in agreement with the thesis advisors will decide whether the project is successful and whether the internship will be extended to the full six months. Upon returning to Northwestern the student will present his/her results in the form of a written report and a brief presentation in the Graduate Seminar Series.
The internships will make use of the extensive connections the Northwestern faculty have with other institutions and labs. Close contact between the thesis advisors and the student's host will contribute substantially to the success of the internships.
Potential Hosts
A number of potential hosts
have expressed their interest in
participating in the internship program;
Below is a brief
description of some of the proposed hosts.
G.B. McFadden, N.I.S.T.
Computation and analysis on a broad range of solidification theory
with close links to experimentalists in the Metallurgy Group at
N.I.S.T. McFadden has worked closely with both Davis (ESAM) and Voorhees (MSE).
R.E. Ecke,
Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Experiments on pattern formation in fluids.
M. Sheppard, Schlumberger Cambridge Research. Research on
multiphase flow in pipes and flow of complex fluids in porous media
with applications to oilfield research. Will provide students with
exposure to industrial research.
D. Choudhury, G. Luther, M. Gildea, Corning Inc.
Researchers in Corning's Process Engineering and Modeling Group, familiar with
the simulation of lightwave components and systems. Will provide useful
exposure to nonlinear dynamics in an industrial setting. CLose collaboration
with Kath (ESAM).
J.P. Gollub, Haverford College and U. Pennsylvania.
Leading experimentalist in nonlinear
dynamics and pattern formation.
A strong advocate of
undergraduate education, track record of advising successful research
by undergraduates; particularly stimulating for
future educators in undergraduate institutions.
E. Bodenschatz, Cornell U.
Experimentalist working on pattern formation, nonlinear dynamics and
turbulence. With a Ph.D. in theoretical physics he is
particularly well suited to help students bridge the gap between
experimental and theoretical work.
M. Dennin, U. California Irvine.
Experimentalist working on electroconvection of liquid crystals and on thin films. Close collaboration with Riecke (ESAM)
S. Nagel, U. Chicago.
Experience with taking theory students into laboratory work on
hydrodynamic instabilities and granular materials.
I. Rehberg and L. Kramer, U. Bayreuth, Germany.
Large laboratory with students working on pattern formation,
dynamics of granular media and complex fluids.
Theory of pattern formation, spatio-temporal chaos, complex fluids.
Close collaborations with Riecke (ESAM).
Recent Examples
Sandeep Bhatt
Description:
Corning intern program at Sullivan Park, Painted Post, NY
Advisors: William L. Kath (ESAM) and Prem Kumar (ECE)
Summer of 2000.
The following account of his internship was provided by Sandeep Bhatt,
an IGERT fellow and fourth year applied mathematics Ph.D. student
working with Professors Kath (ESAM) and Kumar (ECE):
Last year (summer of 2000) the Corning intern program consisted of
about 180 students. Of these, 40 or so were graduate students. Some of
the graduate students worked on the administrative side, at the Decker
building in downtown Corning, NY. The remainder worked at the research
facility, Sullivan Park, which sits atop a hill in Painted Post,
NY. While the program is aimed primarily at undergraduates, I gathered
that there was also a desire to expand graduate student participation
in the program, particularly at Sullivan Park. Given Corning's current
interests, research interns including applied mathematicians,
electrical engineers, materials engineers, and biologists.
My own experience of the program was quite favorable. My research
concerns the modeling of fiber optic devices, and at Corning I worked
in the group concerned with modeling (analytically and numerically)
point to point communication using optical fiber. I was lucky enough
to start my internship around the time my supervisor was starting a
new project in collaboration with one of the experimental groups. I
was invited to all the key meetings involving the project, and while
my primary interaction was with my supervisor, all of the key
participants made themselves available to answer my technical
questions. In addition, I also had to give several presentations to a
larger general audience in order to see how the work I was doing fit
in with the larger goals of the modeling group.
My experience was not atypical. Interns were very much a part of
ongoing research at Corning, and those that I talked to were always
given the opportunity to present their work to general audiences
within their research groups. Interns were also encouraged to speak to
researchers in other divisions in order to learn more about what kind
of work occurs at Sullivan Park. In fact, all the interns received a
list of names and numbers of supervisors willing to be "interviewed"
about their jobs and their research. Last year, several students were
able to interview Roger Ackerman, CEO of Corning, Inc.
Ultimately, the value of an industrial internship lies in seeing
firsthand how an industry tackles the problems it faces. The
internship program at Corning seems designed to make sure interns are
involved in that problem solving process.
Further information can be found at
Corning,
under the Summer Internship
link. For more details about the internship (how housing works,
schedule, etc.), I can also be reached at s-bhatt@northwestern.edu.
Kim Montgomery (ESAM)
Description:
As my IGERT internship, I attended the Methods of Computational Neuroscience class at the Marine Biology
Laboratory. I first heard about the class from Sara Solla who has participated in teaching the course for
the last several years. The first three weeks of the program consisted of research presentations from
experts in computational neuroscience. The research presentations covered a wide range of topics, from
information theory to analysis of rhythms in the cortex to the physiology of various sensory systems to
adaptation and learning. We also had the opportunity to tour some of the lab's experimental facilities. At
the end of the course, I presented a short project in which I applied techniques from information theory in
analyzing the response of a model of the turtle inner ear to complex stimuli. I also had the opportunity to
discuss my hair cell research with two experimental hair cell researchers who expressed interest in our
planned research directions.
Comments:
The course provided a good introduction to various topics in computational neuroscience. I'm happy I was
able to attend. Though the course was not a typical internship in that I was only there for a month and it
was a class rather than a more research oriented experience, I enjoyed it and I think that an activity such
as the Woods Hole course would be a useful substitute for a more standard internship for some people.
Theodore Rieger (ChE)
Description:
My IGERT internship took place in industry at the Eli Lilly Corporation in Indianapolis, IN. I obtained the job through
my advisor's contacts in the Bioinformatics Group, at Lilly's research labs. This was very exciting because it helped me
to broaden my exposure to my own field (modeling, systems biology) and showed me how it is applied industrially.
I was at Lilly for just 2.5 months, which was really only enough time to get my feet wet. I worked
closely with a Ph.D. researcher on a number of projects. The projects I worked on were a little bit more "academic" in nature than product
driven, due to the length of my internship. Most of my time was used doing literature searches and setting up software
frameworks for future, more in-depth research projects. I definitely felt, however, that my time was well-used and spent.
I learned a lot about modeling and its integration with modern systems-biology experiments, such as microarrays.
Comments:
It was very good to get some more industrial exposure; however, I was unable to take full advantage of my time at Lilly
because I was brought in as a contract employee (rather than a temporary Lilly employee). Not being a Lilly employee
complicates the intellectual property issues, limiting what meetings an intern can attend and what projects they can work
on.
I also recommend pushing harder with your host to get housing information from their HR dept. While my
apartment was okay (found on my own) the neighborhood turned out to be undesirable.
Christopher Campbell (ChE)
Description:
This summer, I had the opportunity to work in the Whitesides Group in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at
Harvard University. I was under the direct supervision of my advisor here at Northwestern, Dr. Bartosz Grzybowski, and
worked closely with a post-doctoral fellow, Dr. Piotr Garstecki, whose background was primarily in physics and in
computational modeling. I also had the opportunity to work with Dr. Val Vullev, a post-doctoral fellow with experience in
organic synthesis, and Adam Winkelman, a graduate student in the Whitesides group. My primary project was under the scope
of my IGERT research interests, building a background for my work here at Northwestern by learning how to do rapid
prototyping in a cleanroom, techniques in soft lithography and rapid prototyping with PDMS, and analysis and
characterization techniques, such as SEM, digital optical microscopy, profilometry, and confocal microscopy. I was also
able to learn programming in Visual Basic, and began to code in simple programs for modeling and image analysis.
Comments:
This experience was quite unique, as I was able to work with a group that had expertise in many different areas, from
chemistry to biology to physics to applied engineering. It was great to be able to learn with many different people from
diverse backgrounds, as it helped me gain an even greater appreciation for the interdisciplinary nature of the projects I
will be working on, as well as for my involvement in the IGERT program. If I were to do it again, I would have liked to
have done it in a place where my advisor didn't have such strong ties to, but realized and accepted the circumstances
behind my internship there this summer. I think that it is a great opportunity to be able to go away, learn techniques
from the experts of the field, and use that to build upon my research experiences here at Northwestern.
Aaron Gruber (BME)
Description:
I conducted an internship with Peter Dayan at the Gatsby Computational Unit in the University College London, London UK.
This internship was a fantastic experience that greatly enhanced my education in a number of ways.
My area of research is computational neuroscience, a topic with only limited activity at Northwestern
University. I construct computational models of brain circuits in order to study the role of the neurotransmitter dopamine on signal
processing in the brain. This work is of relevance to many pathologies including Schizophrenia, Parkinson's Disease, and
drug addiction. One recent, but prominent, idea is that dopamine is involved in mediating reward-based learning, commonly
referred to as reinforcement learning. I wanted to include these ideas into my neural network models, but was limited by
the lack
of faculty at Northwestern investigating this area. I used the internship opportunity to work with Peter Dayan, one of
the premier experts on reinforcement learning and its relevance to the nervous system and animal behavior, to help me
implement this type of learning in my network models.
During the three month internship, my interactions with Professor Dayan led me to reformulate my
network model in a way
that is much more relevant to experimental data. This reformulation has greatly strengthened the project and its results.
A short paper on this work has been accepted at the refereed and highly competitive Neural Information Processing Systems
conference; I will present a poster at this meeting. I have had ongoing communication with Professor Dayan. He is
providing advice for the implementation of reinforcement learning in my network, and has provided useful advice for
locating a post-doctoral position. We are planning to submit a longer journal paper on the network results I have
obtained while in London, and an additional paper on the learning work that is currently underway.
Comments:
The internship has been a tremendous experience for me. It has exposed me to a high-level group that uses
computational
techniques to understand the nervous system; this environment is not available to me at Northwestern University. Both the
internship itself and the continued collaboration with Professor Dayan and a postdoctoral fellow that I met at the Gatsby
Computational Unit has had a positive impact on my research and my development as a researcher. I truly value this
experience, and only wish that the internship was for a longer duration.
Anne Catlla (ESAM)
Description:
From early August to mid-January of 2003, I was an IGERT intern in Anna Lin's lab in the physics department at Duke
University. Anna Lin is an experimentalist who works on the light sensitive Belouzov-Zhabotinsky (BZ) chemical reaction
in the oscillatory regime. In a thin layer, the concentrations of the reactants oscillate in a spiral wave pattern in
space. My goal was to create an experiment to consider local feedback in an excitable reaction-diffusion system using the
light-sensitive BZ reaction. To do this, I first tuned the chemical concentrations and a spatially homogeneous external
light intensity to make the BZ system behave in a subexcitable rather than oscillatory fashion, i.e. the concentrations of
the reactants are constant. When the external light is lowered at a given spatial location, the local kinetics shift from
subexcitable to oscillatory causing a wave (of higher concentration of one of the reactants) to be emitted from that
location. Once I had properly tuned the chemical concentrations, I wrote a computer code to run the following experiment:
a collection of preselected locations in space (nodes) are 'connected' such that when a wave passes a sender node, the
external light intensity is lowered at a corresponding receiver node, causing a wave to be emitted at the receiver node's
location. Thus we could create a network of nodes in an excitable reaction-diffusion system. This experiment was
motivated by recent work on networks of integrate-and-fire nodes.
Comments:
This internship was obtained with much help from my advisor, Mary Silber. I had
become interested in Anna's work the year
before after attending a presentation of her research at a conference. Mary also thought that Anna would be a good
internship advisor. Because Mary knew Anna, she contacted her initially about the internship. Once Anna had agreed to
have me as an intern, I contacted her to plan details such as the dates of the internship. I had two opportunities to
meet with Anna before the internship. Once when she spoke at Northwestern and once at a conference at Duke. These
meetings gave us the opportunity to plan my project, for me to visit the lab, and for me to meet Anna's graduate students.
Although experimental problems prevented me from reaching the point where I could gather data, I consider the internship a
valuable experience. I was able to learn several experimental techniques including the programming language Labview,
which is often used in experiments. This knowledge and experience improved my ability to communicate with
experimentalists since I am better able to recognize the important challenges to overcome and questions to ask. I also
learned that I really enjoy working on experiments, and I now plan to include experimental work in my thesis research as
well as in my career. Finally, I was able to experience graduate student life in another institution. This gave me a
better perspective on how to get the most out of my experience at Northwestern. For example, participating in a physics
women group at Duke motivated me to start the Seminar for Women in Science and Engineering at Northwestern.
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