Applicants must be U.S. citizens or have appropriate authorization to work in the U.S. The internship projects are diverse but broadly employ interdisciplinary teams of interns to answer specific fundamental questions and/or to solve specific technical problems. We envision that each intern will work on an independent project that is embedded within a broader team effort.

The ideal candidate will: 

-  be excited to participate in team research 

-  have the initiative to lead their own project

-  possess the communication skills needed to efficiently explain their ideas and results to people from other disciplines

To apply,  please upload your one-page resume and your one-page statement of purpose that answers the following two questions through the application form. 

1. Why is this summer research internship important to you?
2. What would you like to accomplish during this summer internship?

Please also indicate on the application which internship project(s) would be best for you. Only your first or second choice will be considered. 

If you have any questions about the internship, please contact the Fischell Institute's Communications and Program Specialist Ambi Narula at fischellinstitute@umd.edu. 

Kaitlyn Ro worked in the Institute for Bioscience and Biotechnology Research (IBBR) Professor and Fischell Institute Fellow Greg Payne's research lab. For her project, she evaluated a systems-level measurement of oxidative stress for a study testing how dietary interventions affect mental health. The samples measured were collected from a clinical study conducted at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center to investigate the effects of gluten on individuals with schizophrenia and gluten sensitivity. Ro’s efforts offer researchers and clinicians a better understanding of interactions across the gut-brain axis.

Kishore Krishnakumar worked in Director William Bentley's lab under gradute student, Ben Wu, on two interconnected projects: automating parts of the Bentley Lab and investigating if patterns in cell growth under one set of conditions can carry over to other conditions, allowing a machine learning model to learn those patterns once and optimize experiments on its own.

Jaehee Yi worked with Fischell Institute affiliate EternusBio Inc., a startup developing personalized dental hygiene solutions. She optimized the design of a proprietary, full-mouth oral hygiene device for dental prosthetic patients. The technology combines targeted fluid jet action with bioengineering, to improve oral hygiene for patients with dental prosthetics.

Alexandra Tombleson contributed to three projects at Fischell Institute affiliate EternusBio Inc., a startup developing personalized dental hygiene solutions. 

Tombleson’s projects focused on developing a mobile application to receive and visualize continuous streams of oral health data from a proprietary dental implant prosthesis. The prosthesis incorporates smart technology through embedded systems engineering.

In another project, Tombleson optimized and commercialized a magnetic nanoparticle therapeutic carrier platform to help with targeted drug delivery. Her contributions included conducting customer discovery, developing business models, evaluating clinical acceptance criteria, and describing the technology in grant proposals.

Tombleson’s third project developed a novel regenerative dental filling. She created cement formulations with varying ingredient concentrations, tested their compressive strength, and evaluated their material properties. Alongside this experimental work, she researched competing products and formulations.

Minh Ngyen worked in Fischell Institute Fellow Giuliano Scarcelli’s Optics Biotech Lab. His research uses machine learning and deep learning to detect keratoconus, a progressive eye disease that causes corneal distortion, from Brillouin microscopy data. During his internship, he developed Python pipelines for data processing and feature extraction, implemented machine learning models, and built a neural network to improve disease classification. Nguyen worked primarily in the lab’s Baltimore research space alongside bioengineering doctoral student Ronald Yang.