Students are given the opportunity to work in the public sector by providing services to the US government and municipalities. In the past, students have been able to spend their summers in places such as New York City and Washington, DC to promote and service the fields of Earth Science and Environmental Sustainability through the public sector.
Lisa Morasco; pursued MS in Sustainability in the Urban Environment (Graduated in December 2012) was a Community Partnership Intern at the New York City Department of Buildings in the summer of 2012. Her duties included assisting the department of building’s sustainability, community partnerships, and urban design units on several initiatives including CoolRoofs, Urban Canvas, and Sustainable Contractors.
Sergio de Hoyos; pursued his ME in Civil Engineering was a Acheson-Wildfire Resources Assistance at the US Department of Agriculture (HACU), Washington, DC in the summer of 2012. Responsibilities spanned the breadth of the wildlife, soils, air, and weather areas of policy development, budget support, managing data and information, developing communication applications for partners and publics, and technology transfer. Specific projects included work on ecological restoration activities, review of management documents, database development, and review of various policies pertinent to the field.
Miguel Lopez; pursuing his PhD in Electrical Engineering was a GEM Fellow, RHIC Real Time Data Link (RTDL) Data Logger at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, NY in the summer of 2012 and is still traveling to Upton to continue his research. The purpose of this internship was to design and demonstrate the feasibility of an FPGA-based logger dedicated to record all RHIC’s RTDL data in real time. The RTDL data contains different live machine parameters and, there was no single device capable of logging of the RTDL frames. RHIC machine parameters are transmitted using a serial self-clocking bi-phase mark encoding. To decode the information, a finite state machine was used. A microblaze was designed inside the FPGA to read the decoded data and send it to the logging client through Ethernet. A small Python program was written to read the incoming data and store it in a file.
Equisha Glenn is pursuing her g her MSc in Earth System Sciences and Environmental Engineering. She was a Research Associate, NOAA National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service, Baltimore, MD. Equisha worked on SST analysis of the Caribbean and surrounding regions using NOAA’S Optimum Interpolated SST product (OISST), also referred to as the Reynold’s SST product. By the conclusion of the internship,Equisha to retrieve and process the Reyonld’s data (in netCDF format) through data processing techniques and tools in MATLAB.
William Valdez pursued his MSc in Sustainability in the Urban Environment, Environmental Protection Agency, New York, NY
Gregory Aponte pursued his MSc in Sustainability in the Urban Environment. Gregory was a US Corps of Engineers Pathways Intern Student Trainee, United States Army Corps of Engineers in New York, NY. Gregory was assigned to learn and incorporate statistical analysis, programming, decision trees, problem solving processes, remote sensing, drafting, specifications, graphic design, 3D modeling, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and life cycle assessments. He was appointed to planning Division: Coastal Engineering branch, where tasks revolved around shore protection, coastal comprehensive studies and beach nourishment projects. These are designed, constructed and maintained specifically to reduce the risk of economic losses arising from coastal storms, primarily along communities with high-value public and private infrastructure immediately landward of the beach.
