Four SJC Long Island seniors and two 2019 graduates participated this summer in the 2019 Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internship (SULI) at Brookhaven National Lab (BNL) in Upton, New York.
The internship program — open to college students across the country — kicked off June 3 and concluded Aug. 9. The students presented their research findings during a poster session Thursday, Aug. 8.
“This is a nationally competitive, prestigious internship program,” said S. Jane Fritz, assistant professor of mathematics and computer science at SJC Long Island. “We are fortunate to have one or two in the program, some years. To have six in the program this year is very impressive.”
An informal collaboration has existed between St. Joseph’s and BNL for over two decades. In addition to choosing St. Joseph’s students as interns and employing graduates of the College, the lab has also helped the institution receive major grants through writing letters of support.
The Interns
This year’s SJC Long Island interns were mathematics and computer science majors Enrique Gambra ’19, Abigail Giles ’20, Kerri McMahon ’20, Joshua Papello ’19 and Andrew Rogerson ’20, as well as biology major Lindsey McKenna ’20.
Enrique Gambra ’19
Research topic: Implementing a closed loop circuit design to protect manipulators and gate valves. 
Abigail Giles ’20
Research topic: Enabling rapid materials discovery through AI-assisted autonomous crystal structure characterization.
Lindsey McKenna ’20
Research topic: An evaluation of pollinator diversity and vegetation analysis in BNL’s solar farm.
Kerri McMahon ’20
Research topic: Security implementations in the polyhedral compilation framework.
Joshua Papello ’19
Research topic: Tuning hyper-parameters to enhance the performance of the DEEP SORT algorithm.
Andrew Rogerson ’20
Research topic: Use of machine learning and neural networks for analysis of nuclear fuel rod images.
