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ITaP interns get real experience with research and technology, graduate student life

ITaP summer research intern Lutalo Webb already knew he would be back when he arrived at Purdue. The May engineering graduate from Vanderbilt University had applied and been accepted for graduate school in West Lafayette.

But the time he’s spent analyzing tests of advanced optics technology promises to give him a running start, and it solidified his choice of major professors. “Our personalities kind of clicked,” Webb said of electrical and computer engineering Professor Vladimir Shalaev, whose lab he worked in this summer.

ITaP intern Terrin Celestin, University of Maryland Baltimore County, wasn’t as sure about graduate school before his experience at Purdue. Now, he said he is likely to aim for a doctorate. He found out he likes the idea of running his own research program, even the challenges.

Celestin, who will be a senior at Maryland this fall, worked with Purdue Professor Jason Vaughn Clark in electrical and computer engineering. He helped develop a graphical user interface for Clark’s microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) simulation software. The project forced him to learn MATLAB from scratch. “At first it seemed a little overwhelming,” he said.

In all, five interns were sponsored by ITaP and the NASA-funded Indiana Space Grant Consortium at Purdue under the Purdue Research Opportunities Program (PROP), said Gilbert Rochon, who directs ITaP’s satellite and remote-sensing program, the Purdue Terrestrial Observatory. The Purdue Graduate School provides for the students through its Summer Research Opportunities Program (SROP), which hosted more than 30 interns sponsored by other campus organizations, too.

The program is designed to encourage talented minority undergraduate students from social and economic backgrounds that often don’t push research careers to move on to graduate school, and to assist in their preparations for graduate study.

Besides Webb and Celestin, the 2009 ITaP interns include Brittany Demas, Xavier University of Louisiana, who worked with cancer biology Professor Sulma Mohammed at the School of Veterinary Medicine; Keisha Smoke, Dillard University in New Orleans, who worked with Steve Witz, director of Purdue's Regenstrief Center for Healthcare Engineering; and Justin Spraglin, also of Xavier, who worked with foods and nutrition Professor Wayne Campbell.

The students receive intensive research experience with Purdue faculty mentors as well as produce research poster and oral presentations. They also attend graduate school admissions test preparation workshops, sessions on career opportunities for doctorates in various fields, and more. The internship comes with a stipend and travel and housing expenses, said Rochon, chief scientist for ITaP research computing in addition to his other duties. Participants also have the application fee waived if they eventually apply to Purdue, Rochon said.

Smoke, who likewise will be a senior this fall, said she heard about the Purdue internship program through a professor at Dillard, where Rochon taught previously. She saw the internship as a way to get a real feel for graduate school by working with a faculty member doing actual research.

A public health and health systems management major, Smoke for her internship worked on a project looking at roles information technology could play in improving health care delivery. She said she would like to earn a doctorate then work in the industry as a hospital administrator, along with running a clinic aimed at the underserved, before becoming a professor.

Photo caption: ITaP-sponsored minority interns for 2009 (L-R) Justin Spraglin, Brittany Demas, Keisha Smoke, Lutalo Webb and Terrin Celestin.

Writer: Greg Kline, science and technology writer, Information Technology at Purdue, (765) 494-8167, gkline@purdue.edu

Last updated: July 23, 2009