Inspiring Careers in Science Research

In an effort to expose high school students to careers in research, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s (Berkeley Lab) Computing Sciences Diversity Outreach Program partnered with San Francisco’s Lowell High School Science Research Program, an after school program that aims to give highly motivated juniors and seniors a chance to develop research projects with professional guidance with the intent to have the students enter the Intel Science Talent Search, a competition sponsored by Intel that offers college scholarships for outstanding scientific work. 

As part of this collaboration, 32 Lowell students got a tour of the Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) in Oakland, Calif. earlier this month. Here, the students got to see Hopper—the world’s eighth most powerful supercomputer—and talk to the center’s system administrators, user consultants and supercomputer analysts about their day-to-day work.

Throughout the month of January, a number of Berkeley Lab Computing Sciences staff also trekked out to Lowell to talk about their research and career paths. The lecturers and mentors include:

• Taghrid Samak, who talked about data-mining and anomaly detection for workflow scientific applications.
• Daniela Ushizima, who talked about computational physics, computer-aided leukemia diagnosis, and image analysis on scientific applications.
• Tony Drummond, who talked about the Energy Department’s Advanced Computational Software Collection, which includes tools to optimize global atmospheric circulation and a Virtual World Data Server for visualizing large datasets that arise in the earth system computer simulations.
• Deborah Agarwal, who heads Berkeley Lab’s Advanced Computing for Science Department and the Data Intensive Systems Group.

Elizabeth Bautista, who heads NERSC’s Computer Operations and Network Support Group, coordinated the Lowell High School partnership with Berkeley Lab Computing Sciences. Over time the plan is to expand the speakers and tours to provide the students with exposure to science areas across the Laboratory. Scientists who are interested in speaking at Lowell High School about their research can contact Elizabeth at EJBautista@lbl.gov.

For more information on the program, please visit: http://lowellscienceresearch.wordpress.com/2010/08/04/welcome-to-lowell-science-research/