Lenore Cowen, Professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Mathematics at Tufts University, wanted to give undergraduate students a taste of data science research during the summer. As assistant director and co-principle investigator of the National Science Foundation-funded Research Experiences for Undergraduates program “Directed, Intensive and Mentored Opportunities in Data Science” or “DIAMONDS,” she paired students with faculty mentors to work on research for 10 weeks. In 2021, she expanded the program to include the Computational Research Leadership Council (CRLC) Seminar Series. That decision directly impacted the trajectory of at least one student’s career.
“We were particularly keen to bring the CRLC seminars to our DIAMONDS students in summer of 2021 because we were still operating as mostly a virtual program after the pandemic,” says Professor Cowen. “Having outside speakers of the caliber of the folks at the National Labs was terrific for the students.” That first year they hosted three speakers. It was so popular, they made it a permanent part of the DIAMONDS offering.
Professor Cowen was particularly interested in the talk by Dr. Line Pouchard, who at the time was a Senior Researcher at Brookhaven National Laboratory and is now a High-Performance Computing (HPC) System Software Researcher at Sandia National Laboratories. Dr. Pouchard’s seminar was directly relevant to the research of Polina Shpilker, one of Professor Cowen’s Ph.D. students.
“Dr. Pouchard and I spoke on Zoom after her excellent seminar, and that’s when we decided to introduce her to Polina,” says Professor Cowen. “We managed to get Dr. Pouchard to come back and repeat the seminar the following summer in-person. That time, Dr. Pouchard also used her visit to talk more to Polina.”
This engagement directly led to Polina successfully applying to work with Dr. Pouchard over the summer through funding provided by Sustainable Horizons Institute’s Sustainable Research Pathways (SRP) summer research experience program, and Polina’s summer project led to a subcontract for Dr. Cowen with Sandia National Laboratories. This subcontract allowed Polina to continue to work on her summer project involving metadata to track HPC workflows.
Ultimately, Dr. Pouchard joined Polina’s thesis committee as an outside member, and Polina’s project with Dr. Pouchard directly inspired the last chapter in Polina’s Ph.D. thesis. Now Polina has a postdoctoral fellowship at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Professor Cowen notes gratefully, “There is no way any of this would have happened without the CRLC seminar series.”