Meet the Interns

Grace Li, a graphics design major at Carnegie Mellon, will be working with the communications team under the mentorship of Robin Scibek, senior communications manager, with tutelage from Megan Carroll, project and customer relations manager.  “Grace has just the skills and experience we were looking for,” says Robin. “We didn’t want just a design major, but also someone who is passionate about storytelling and could help us tell PSC’S story visually.” “Our immediate need is to have someone redesign our style guide,” said Megan, “and Grace fit the bill perfectly.”  “The position as a whole gives me a lot of freedom to play with how I mix-and-match PSC’s core colors, logos, type, and imagery in order to create an overall style guide that can then be adapted to suit different media avenues,” says Grace. “So far, my biggest challenges have been figuring out how to make visual guides and templates that offer versatility while also being easy to use by a general audience. I’m currently applying the skills I learned in school developing visual language systems and working with typography.”

When Grace finishes the style guide, she will be helping to build our brand by designing some of our presentation materials, creating an updated look for our exhibit materials we plan to unveil at SC21 this year. Grace says she’s very thankful to everyone on the team, especially Megan and Robin, who have helped her understand the core values of the PSC organization. “This summer, I have the opportunity to follow through with the whole design process, from building out a multi-faceted design system to sending my designs out to the wider PSC organization to gather user research which will help me contextualize my school education,” added Grace.

Ivan Cao-Berg liked the fact that Hind Albakri had experience providing basic computing support at the University of Pittsburgh. To him this meant she can work well with people and teams. “Beyond technical capabilities,” says Ivan, research software specialist at PSC, “I am always looking for team players.”  Ivan and Hind will be working on streamlining the process of deploying biomedical/bioinformatics applications on Bridges-2, as well as contributing their efforts to public registries. “This process will more than likely include automating the process as much as possible,” added Ivan. What does Hind think about all this? “I am fortunate to be part of this team,” exclaimed Hind.  “I wasn’t sure if I would be working with someone who has no patience when it comes to making mistakes or helping to fix them. Mr. Ivan is really kind and patient and he doesn’t mind training me,” said Hind.

Ivan would also like to spend some time designing and implementing a continuous integration workflow to facilitate deployment of future versions of software packages commonly used by our users, a project Hind is very excited about working on. Hind’s major is physics and computation, but she believes this internship will help further her knowledge in computer science, which is her major. “And being able to put my experience helping to develop software in bioinformatics on my resume is a plus,” concluded Hind.

Rozita Laghaei, a PSC research scientist, was looking for a student with very specific skills when she posted the job description for a research assistant to work with the biomedical research team. She wanted to enhance the current workshop materials, specifically for the MMBIOS project, in addition to other project initiatives when needed. “This student will help us with the creation of instructions, prerequisite materials and exercises for our online workshops,” stated Rozita.  Caleb Wallace worked with her last year so she was happy to see that he had applied for this internship. “I knew that Caleb was very talented and hardworking,” said Rozita, “and the fact that he already knew a few software packages that we will be using in the workshops certainly worked in his favor,” she added.  A student at the University of Pittsburgh majoring in neuroscience, Caleb says his project will be creating computer models of the frog and mouse neuromuscular junctions that will be used in the workshops. “I am looking forward to what I’ll be doing this summer,” said Caleb. “This internship will enable me to have a better focus when it comes to applying to grad school or even starting my own projects in labs later on,” he added.