Sustainable Research Pathways 2018

Over these last evolving four years, the Sustainable Research Pathways (SRP) Program has made significant strides, growing in scale and scope and strengthening research collaborations among world-leading scientists and young researchers. This year was no different. Our program brought together the largest cohort since the launch of the SRP program. Over 40 summer research participants, a record number, benefited from this invaluable opportunity. With several returning teams this year, the summer research experience for the group proved to be exciting and dynamic, diverse academic institutions, ranging from high research to liberal arts, Hispanic serving, and Historically Black Colleges and Universities were among this year’s applicants.

At the workshop, faculty participants shared their research in a poster-blitz and poster session, allowing lab staff to probe the research for possible areas of collaboration. Several promising connections with great potential were made between lab staff and the participating faculty.

Dr. Islam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Western Washington University interested in improving the performance of applications on current and future extreme-scale computing environments. As a first time participant, she recognizes the numerous benefits to the program.

Dr. Tanzina Islam
Western Washington University

“This is a tremendous opportunity for researchers as far as exposure. This opportunity has helped to expand my professional network as well as generate new ideas for future collaborations with other faculty members”.

Through her SRP experience, Dr. Tanzima has had the opportunity to share and promote her research among her students and other disadvantaged groups.

“Besides teaching and research, I am committed as an educator, a scientist, and a member of an underrepresented group to contribute towards broadening the participation of students by recruiting students from diverse backgrounds”.

The experience along with the exposure that students acquire from Berkeley’s Lab research setting is invaluable. For that purpose, it is inevitable the numerous benefits these young researchers attain from the SRP program The experience the program brings to them allows them to better understand the computational science field, learn to balance collaborative and individual projects, and most importantly, determine an area of interest, and jumpstart their careers as researchers.

Dr.Christopher Paolini, Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at San Diego State University (SDSU), was awarded a 10-week summer research fellowship for himself and four SDSU students at Berkeley Laboratory. Dr. Paolini along with his students, Richard Gonzales, Giovanni Garcia, Computational Science Ph.D. candidate, Angel Boada and Jonathan Mathews are working in the Applied Numerical Algorithms Group with Berkeley Lab Staff Scientist Dr. David Trebotich. Dr. Paolini will continue collaborating with Dr. David Trebotich and other staff scientists in the Berkeley Lab Applied Numerical Algorithms Group after this summer experience concludes, and have agreed to work on developing and submitting collaborative Department of Energy research proposals and jointly authored scientific articles in leading journals.

Left to right: Jonathan Matthews (Computational Science PhD candidate); Dr. David Trebotich, Applied Numerical Algorithms Group Staff Scientist, LBNL Computational Research Division; Dr. Christopher Paolini; Giovanni Garcia (Computer Engineering Undergraduate), Angel Boada (Computational Science PhD candidate); Richard Gonzales (Computer Engineering Undergraduate)
Abdullah Sharmin, PhD Student
University of Texas, El Paso

Abdullah Sharmin, doctoral student at Western Washington reflected on her SRP experience: “As a Ph.D. student and researcher, the meetings and conversations I’ve had with the amazing and diverse crowd working here have been educational, invaluable, and in many cases, eye-opening. The opportunity to evaluate my research on cutting-edge supercomputing systems such as Cori, with the help of world-class scientists at one of the most prestigious National Labs in the country has quite literally been a dream come true for me and an amazing experience overall”.

Although the SRP program participants finished up their summer research experience in a few short months, their experience continues to propel them towards new and exciting developments.

Sustainable Horizons Institute could not be more pleased with the results the SRP Program has given. We continue to work hard to bring new opportunities to benefit the up and coming generation of scientists. This successful collaboration would not be possible without Berkeley Lab. We anticipate continuous success of the SRP program and look forward to the promising results of all the projects and collaborations that have been a result of this joint effort between SHI and Berkeley Lab.

SRP 2018 Cohort

More SRP success stories can be found below. Such success stories provide insight into the significant effect the SRP Program has on its participants and their contributions to a never-ending and always changing, multifaceted developing research world.



Dr. Zhao Sun, Hampton University

"My participation in the 2019 summer research project was the best summer I have ever had in my life, though it runs so fast. With the direction from Dr. Bert de Jong, we were encouraged to access unlimited resources, including meetings both on quantum algorithms and hardware platform, seminars/workshops on deep machine learning, etc. We will continue  our work with Dr. Gang Huang...
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Rachel Thomas, University of Saint Mary

"As a result of participating in the SRP Program, I have learned about the immense potential and various benefits that computational research and analysis can provide. Molecular dynamics is, and will continue to be a major contributor to our understanding of biological systems at the molecular level. Berkeley Lab is a strong advocate for promoting team work and collaboration among scientists....
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Dr. Islam, Western Washington State University.

The most exciting part about joining the SRP Program has been having the opportunity to work on the supercomputer Cori and with the application scientists closely. We are working on analyzing the performance of ECP applications and validating some of the proxies that the AMREX team has developed. Over the summer, we developed a machine learning framework, VERITAS, that identifies which hardware...
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Jai Huntley, Hampton University

I am an Electrical Engineering major from Hampton University. My advisor, Dr. Sun invited me to form part of her SRP team. This was my first research experience and it is amazing to see how much my confidence has grown in 10 weeks in the quantum computing. I have a better understanding of  quantum computing, quantum controls, and  had the opportunity...
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Dr. Christopher Paolini, San Diego State University

 Over the summer, Dr. Paolini’s students worked with LBNL developed codes that simulate microscale flows in complex porous media geometries.  The students gained unique skills in using state-of-the-art high-performance computing resources for simulating pore scale, geologic subsurface flow using finite volume, embedded boundary (EB) methods where irregular boundaries are represented by intersecting a geologic domain with a cartesian grid.  Dr....
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