Philander Smith College may be small, but it has always been focused on fostering greater opportunities for its students and community. A historically Black college in Little Rock, Arkansas, it has a little over 750 students and was recently ranked among the top 10 most accessible schools for lower-income students in the US. Assistant Professor Suzan Anwar has opened additional doors and helped her students dream even bigger through the Sustainable Research Pathways for High-Performance Computing (SRP-HPC) program.
Professor Anwar and her students Mykala Wright and Knia Williams spent the summer working at Argonne National Laboratory with Dr. Justin Wozniak, a Computer Scientist at Argonne’s Data Science and Learning Division.
“I invited Knia to join so she could gain the confidence in her own skills and knowledge,” says Professor Anwar. “Before she graduated, Knia said she would go into design, but after our experience at Argonne, she got two interviews for researcher positions. She knew she could do it.”
Professor Anwar and her students worked on the Deep Learning Workflows for Cancer project, which aimed to extend the Cancer Distributed Learning Environment (CANDLE) by adding support for running and monitoring CANDLE workflows from Jupyter notebooks. The project team worked on a Jupyter notebook to update/change the NT3 (Norma/Tumor) program code to examine the current accuracy. They also worked on visualizing the results using Python libraries. The end goal was to zoom in on individual models from among large training runs and make it easier to get meaning out of them.
Dr. Wozniak, who started at Argonne as a student himself, is grateful for the opportunity to work with a team from Philander Smith College. “It was a great connection. With typical student projects, you don’t get a team; you have individual interactions,” says Dr. Wozniak. “I’m looking for niche people who are willing to work here. We’re wiring together weird systems, so we need people who are flexible and creative. The team from Philander was great.”
In addition to their research, the students became comfortable in a lab setting, learning how to present their progress on a task and ask questions of other researchers. Mykala is a senior this year and she is using what she learned at Argonne in her capstone project. She has become more involved in computer science activities on campus, and ultimately, she wants to pursue graduate school in computer science or a related field.
Professor Anwar has also brought her experience back to the classroom. “SRP-HPC opened doors for me to explore different methodologies to improve students’ engagement in a research environment,” says Anwar. “And it helped in empowering my career path by increasing research possibilities and collaborations with other participants from different colleges and universities.”