Briah' Davis joined the Unidata Program Center as a SOARS summer intern on May 30, 2017. This fall Briah' will be a senior at the University at Albany, SUNY, where she is majoring in Atmospheric Science and Computer Science with a minor in Mathematics.

SOARS, Significant Opportunities in Atmospheric Research and Science, is an undergraduate-to-graduate bridge program at UCAR designed to broaden participation in the atmospheric and related sciences. The program is built around research, mentoring and community. SOARS participants, called protégés, spend up to four summers doing research in atmospheric and related sciences. This is Briah's second summer in the program and her first at Unidata.

Aubrey Kane joined the Unidata Program Center as a communications summer intern on May 30, 2017. Aubrey is a senior at Regis University, majoring in mathematics with a minor concentration in communication. She plans to begin applying to graduate programs in statistics in the fall.

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.

Tyler Wixtrom joined the Unidata Program Center as a software development summer intern on May 30, 2017. Tyler has just graduated from Valparaiso University with a Bachelor of Science in Meteorology and will be starting work toward a Master's degree in Atmospheric Sciences at Texas Tech University in the fall. His main interests are in Numerical Weather Prediction and the transition of research to operational applications, as well as in the development of software tools in support of forecasters and researchers. Tyler will be working in development of the MetPy package, with the goal of adding user-friendly functionality for vertical interpolation to various coordinate systems, such as isentropic or isobaric coordinates.

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.

John Leeman joined the Unidata Program Center software development team on January 30th, 2017. John obtained bachelor's degrees in meteorology and geophysics from the University of Oklahoma in 2012, and a PhD in geoscience from Penn State in 2017. He has worked in research fields ranging from gas hydrate thermodynamics to SODAR and boundary layer instrumentation, and did his doctoral work in earthquake physics. John's software development experience includes work on the seafloor process simulator at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and telemetry analysis tools for NASA's Morpheus lunar lander project. The common thread amongst all of these projects was “the development of new tools and software to attack previously intractable problems.”

As a researcher himself, John brings first-hand knowledge of how scientists want to interact with their research tools to Unidata. He joined the Unidata Program Center because, he says, “making well tested and reliable tools with which to conduct reproducible science is probably the largest challenge and most needed area of innovation in research today.”

The Unidata Program Center's two summer student interns — Kristen Pozsonyi from Millersville University and Alex Haberlie from Northern Illinois University — 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 29, 2016.