The Exponential Impact of SRP  

The Exponential Impact of SRP        

It is the rare and special summer internship that not only changes your life, but also allows you to open new doors and new worlds to others over many years. In the summer of 2019, when Tanzima Islam was a professor at Western Washington University, she was part of Sustainable Research Pathways (SRP) and went to Berkeley Lab with two of her undergraduate students. She calls the experience a “defining moment” for her career, and the research they conducted led to software, published papers, and the backbone for her early career research.

This year, Professor Islam, now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Texas State University, was selected to participate in the prestigious Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Early Career Research Program and to continue her SRP experience through the SRP High-Performance Computing (HPC) program. SRP-HPC is designed to connect students from (and faculty working with) underrepresented groups with DOE National Laboratory scientists to encourage lasting collaborations and jump start careers.

Through SRP-HPC, Professor Islam brought three students, one at each stage of their academic career—Chase Phelps, a Ph.D. student, a first-generation college student, and a disabled combat veteran of the U.S. Army; Arunavo Dey, a Master’s student; and Alicia Guite, a freshman— to work with Kerstin Kleese van Dam, Director of the Computational Science Initiative at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory. Their project involved developing and integrating new analytics into Brookhaven Lab’s  exascale performance and anomaly detection infrastructure. Both Professor Islam and Kleese van Dam express their gratitude at being matched with each other, as there are not many people who focus on workflow performance measurement tools.

“This experience had a very direct impact on the Chimbuko project,” says Kleese van Dam. “Having someone you can talk to and bounce ideas off is just great. The whole team brought in new ideas. Things that we had thought of, but have never had the opportunity to pursue.”

The students also speak about the opportunities this experience has unlocked for them. For Chase, who had a previous internship at Livermore Lab and who has published papers with Professor Islam, SRP-HPC gave greater exposure to HPC, other research, and scientists in his field.

Because of his experience, Arunavo has shifted his own research toward HPC. “I am from a machine learning background, and before the summer program, I did not have much knowledge about the supercomputing field and how we can leverage machine learning models,” says Arunavo. “It helped me broaden my research ideas and objective.”

For her part, Alicia says the SRP-HPC program helped her become more confident in her abilities. During her internship, Alicia submitted a research poster to the highly competitive and prestigious International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage, and Analysis (SC22) that was recently accepted. A tremendous accomplishment for a freshman in college! “Dr. Islam is a huge inspiration. As a freshman, I didn’t know what was possible,” she says. “ I did not expect something like this to come out of my first summer internship.”

The team is continuing their collaboration through funding for another research project and ultimately, Kleese van Dam hopes the experiences will lead to one or more of the students joining a Lab. “We are always looking also towards future staff for us,” she says. “So we hope the students consider working with us in the future as they progress in their career.”

To learn more about Sustainable Research Pathways visit the SRP page.
To apply visit our submission site.