UCSD Undergraduates Selected to Research Cyberinfrastructure at Pacific Rim Universities

A unique summer program that allows University of California, San Diego undergraduate students to do hands-on, information-technology research in Asia is expanding this year from three to four host countries, and the program is drawing more female students.

Thirteen students - five of them women - fly next week from the United States to their respective host sites in Australia, Japan, Taiwan and China, the newest site. The students are part of a pilot program at UCSD called Pacific Rim Undergraduate Experiences (PRIME), launched in 2004 to encourage global experiences for students doing research related to the global cyberinfrastructure.

Many of this year's recruits were introduced to the program by word-of-mouth. Shirley Lee is headed for Taiwan. "I heard about the PRIME program through a friend who participated in it last summer," said Lee, a biotechnology major in UCSD's Jacobs School of Engineering, Class of '06. "We volunteer in the same bioengineering lab, so I was able to learn about his experiences in Osaka, Japan last summer."

"That is a very encouraging sign," concluded Gabriele Wienhausen, provost of UCSD's Sixth College and PRIME's principal investigator. "It shows that last year's students came away with very positive experiences from working alongside researchers in labs where the language and customs may be very different."

PRIME is supported by a grant from NSF (NSF INT 0407508) and from the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2). It is a partnership of Sixth College, UCSD's Academic Internship Program (AIP), the Pacific Rim Applications and Grid Middleware Assembly (PRAGMA), and the host institutions in Asia and Australia (see below).

In recent weeks, the PRIME students attended a series of meetings designed to give them a crash course in living and wor
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Contact: Doug Ramsey
dramsey@ucsd.edu
858-822-5825
University of California - San Diego
17-Jun-2005