The Discovery Park Undergraduate Research Internship (DURI) program provides professional development opportunities for undergraduate students to work with Purdue faculty on interdisciplinary research projects. This semester, we have three interns working on projects relating to Global Food-Water-Energy Sustainability research.

Meriem Bounab is a junior studying computer science. This semester she is working on managing jobs that are submitted through the SIMPLE-G US tool and refactoring the job manager and job storage strategy so that there can be a distinction between private and public jobs. Meriem is looking forward to the project because,

The work that I will be doing will continue to expand my knowledge and skill set in the Python language and make me a stronger coder. I am excited to be able to work on this project and contribute my coding abilities while advancing my coding experience and career.

Halee Fisher is a freshman studying Agriculture Economics, Psychology, and Global Food and Agriculture Systems. She is also a member of the Pi Beta Phi sorority and sings opera in her spare time. She is passionate about and has done several research projects in food sustainability.  This past summer, she was an intern at CIMMYT in El Batan, Mexico, where she did socioeconomic research in the GIS unit. She will be working on a Jupyter notebook tool to simplify visualization and access of urban sensor data from the Array of Things project in Chicago. When we asked Halee how the internship impacted her future career, she said,

I knew I wanted to get involved with undergraduate research as soon as I came to Purdue and I knew this DURI program was right for me. I don’t have much background in computer programming, so I want to expand my knowledge in this area to become more well-rounded and to be able to use this area in my economic research. I know this learning/knowledge will be useful for me to develop software programming in the food security realm.

Jeremy Chang is a junior, pursuing a double major in computer science and mathematics. As a DURI intern, he is working on building data connectors and processors for a global resource sustainability modeling workflow.