The NSF Unidata Program Center's two summer student interns — Linfeng Li from the University of Michigan and Jaye Norman from North Carolina State University, Raleigh — have come to the end of their summer appointments. After a summer of dedicated work they presented the results of their projects to the UPC staff on July 23, 2025. You can find videos of their presentations to the UPC staff on the Unidata Seminar Series page.
Linfeng Li
Linfeng Li studies the atmospheric dynamics of ice giants and lava planets, and came to Unidata with an with an interest in developing his software engineering skills. His summer's work focused on accelerating the MetPy thermodynamics module using C++, with a side project of creating a 3D visualization of Jupiter thunderstorms.
You can read Linfeng's summer's work in C++ Acceleration of MetPy's Thermodynamics Module for 3D Visualization and Analysis of Jupiter Thunderstorms over on the Unidata Developers' blog. You can also watch the video recording of his presentation to Unidata staff over on the Seminar Series page.
Jaye Norman
Jaye Norman came to Unidata hoping to build knowledge about meteorological software and skills as a software developer. These desires combined in a summer's work creating a software performance benchmarking framework for MetPy.
You can read about Jaye's summer projects in Benchmarking of NSF Unidata MetPy in a CI/CD Workflow over on the Unidata Developers' blog. You can also watch the video recording of his presentation to Unidata staff over on the Seminar Series page.
Stay Tuned
The Unidata Summer Internships offer undergraduate and graduate students an opportunity to work with Unidata software engineers and scientists on projects drawn from a wide variety of areas in the atmospheric and computational sciences. If you're a student thinking about internships for the summer of 2026, keep Unidata in mind. Unidata's summer internships are generally advertised in late December to early January, so be sure to check back at the end of the year. For reference, you can take a look at the Internship page.
We at the Program Center certainly enjoyed having Linfeng and Jaye working beside us this summer, and we wish them the best of luck in their future endeavors.
