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Internship Opportunities

The Etelman Observatory, as part of the UVI Physics Department, offer several research internship opportunities to UVI students. On this page you will find a sample of research projects in the major three areas of interest of UVI Physics faculty, but also links to possible research projects in other mainland institutions (e.g. NASA).

High School Research and Engineering Apprenticeship Programs

The UVI Physics program has been awarded funds from the Department of Defense for a High School Apprenticeship program (HSAP) and Research and Engineering Apprenticeship Program (REAP). USVI students from 9th - 12th grade can work with Physicists and Engineers from UVI's Faculty and Students for 8 weeks and receive stipends. Help explore the Universe and build our UVI Astrophysics Satellite. Apply here. For more information, email Dr. Ashcraft at teresa.ashcraft@uvi.edu.

At UVI/Etelman

Study of Gamma-Ray Burst Afterglow light-curves (Dr. Gendre, Dr. Orange, & Dr. Dainotti)

Significant gaps remain in our understanding of the phenomenon of Gamma-Ray Bursts. Recently, a new catalog compiling all observations ever done and publicly available for GRB afterglows has been published, and is now ready for scientific use. Student researchers interested in this project will work with Dr. Gendre, Dr. Orange, and Dr. Dainotti to help exploiting the catalog.

Virgin Island Robotic Telescope Data Analysis (Dr. Gendre & Dr. Orange)  

The Virgin Island Robotic Telescope is acquiring data on a large variety of astronomical sources, from  galaxies, to supernovae, and gamma-ray bursts. This incredible resources and amount of data require continue data processing improvement and quality assessment. Dr. Gendre, in synergy with other faculty, will lead this effort of developing and testing the data processing of VIRT data. Students will learn top-notch programming skills (e.g. python programming language) and the versatility of applying such knowledge to not just VIRT data, but also data from other telescopes and facilities all around the World.

Developing Critical Management Provisions for a USVI Microclimate Monitioring Program (Dr. Orange) 

This project will focus on constructing, implementing, and documenting the analytics that will substantiate the techniques necessary for the long-term consistent operation of a network of USVI remote weather sensing stations. Students involved in this project will, particularly, work on identifying data stream anomalies indicative of hardware malfunctions and/or failures, and implementing the subsequent instrumentation maintenance. They will additionally assist Dr. Orange in the development of data stream quality control algorithms that semi-autonomously identify anomalies and predict suspect hardware components.

Addressing the Utility of Geographically Standardized Logic When Analyzing Historical Climate Records (Dr. Orange) 

Typically, historical climate studies rely on automated data-processing tools, which eliminate the user's final binary decision on deciding whether to remove or keep suspect time series and/or spatial perspectives, as well as adhere to a rigid spatiotemporally standardized logic. Student researchers on this project will work with Dr. Orange on analyzing ground truth climate inventory-binary decision matrices obtained from diverse errant entry handling assumptions. Specifically, they will utilize these data to decipher the limiting logic that best mitigates scenarios of small upstream anomalies leading to large downstream inaccuracies in tropical studies of extreme climate variability.

 

At NASA Centers

Other Possibilities

Other resources -CONTACT YOUR PHYSICS FACULTY IF INTERESTED