Summer Interns Gain Research Experience

Conducting oceanographic research aboard the University of Washington’s R/V Rachel Carson was a highlight for the group of student interns hosted at the Laboratory last summer. During a two-month internship program, Amanda Labrado, STEM Development Program Coordinator, guided the cohort through a professional development seminar series, matched each with an APL-UW scientist mentor to tackle project-based research, and encouraged peer-to-peer learning and networking.

The Summer Undergraduate Research Program, now in its third year under Labrado’s leadership, provides undergraduate students the opportunity to conduct research, participate in professional development, build community with young scientists, and learn how to navigate pathways to a career in maritime and oceanographic science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM). 

At the heart of each intern’s experience is an independent research project under the guidance of an APL-UW research staff mentor recruited and trained into the program by Labrado. Rooted in mentors’ areas of expertise, individual research projects in 2025 ranged from wireless power and data transfer by underwater robots to the effect of changing sea ice conditions on phytoplankton blooms in the Southern Ocean circling Antarctica. Each intern’s project is designed to generate data and the opportunity for analysis. The program is capped with the interns presenting results in public poster fairs.

Peer learning is a key to program success. “We intentionally recruit students with different majors and experience levels. Most have had no prior opportunities to conduct research,” says Labrado. “This naturally leads to layers of peer mentoring.” Organized team learning activities include building a sensor in a maker-space lab, understanding and applying computer data processing and visualization tools, and deploying oceanographic technologies from a research vessel.

The program’s classroom component is a seminar series designed and led by Labrado on topics that include a crash course in oceanography to increase proficiency for interns without prior classes in the subject, resume writing, well-being for STEM professionals, and poster creation and presentation. Guest lecturers from industry are invited to give in-depth talks about specific technologies and discuss their career journeys into the private sector.

Doctoral Student Research at LeConte Glacier

Integral to the collaborative APL-UW and Oregon State University observational campaign in summer 2025 were the contributions of Ashley Howard and Murad Mehrab Abrar, UW Ph.D. students in oceanography and mechanical engineering, respectively. Ashley, advised by Principal Oceanographer Zoltan Szuts, assisted with μFloat deployments, but was focused on leading the EM-APEX profiling float operations: programming, as well as launches and recoveries in LeConte Bay. "I got to work with an amazing science team and ship crew to retrieve as much data as possible, even when the ice conditions became challenging," says Howard.

Since the summer cruise she has been calculating the floats' trajectories from GPS fixes surrounding each dive to correct measured subsurface velocities to an absolute velocity and thus understand tidal forcing in the bay. Combining these observations with those taken by other autonomous platforms near the glacier terminus, Howard is contributing to the complete picture of stratification, mixing, and subsurface circulation in LeConte Bay.

Mehrab Abrar became interested in the μFloat platform in the fall of 2024 because its underwater acoustic localization technique aligns with his research experience in robotic navigation. Now, with Senior Engineer Trevor Harrison as his Ph.D. advisor, he is developing algorithms to track μFloats acoustically with high precision from maximum position updates. "I use trilateration techniques aided by multiple GPS tracked surface buoys and underwater beacons," explains Murad. "My algorithm integrates acoustic range measurements from multiple devices to reconstruct float trajectories, accounting for relative depth and speed variations among devices."

A Mathematician Immersed in Acoustics Research

Only two years ago Caesar Tuguinay knew very little about the fields of ocean acoustics or fisheries science, but a student opportunity posed by Principal Oceanographer Wu-Jung Lee caught his attention. "I had just finished my undergraduate degree and was looking for an experience that mixed coding and research," says Tuguinay. Now a first-year Ph.D. student in electrical engineering at UW, he has gained expertise through his involvement with the Integrated West Coast Pelagics Survey project and is now writing a paper providing guidance on organizing and processing fisheries acoustic data. 

Since joining the project Caesar has tackled tasks essential to streamlining acoustic data analysis, from raw data consolidation and cloud-optimized standardization to writing base code for the Pacific hake recognition model. He recounts that to make the code generalizable across many years of survey data, he and Lee read many physical logbooks and conducted interviews with the NOAA experts who had collected the data. "The coolest part of this experience," says Tuguinay, "has been to see others in the fisheries acoustics community use the code that I helped to develop."

Joining the research leg of the survey on Shimada last September, Caesar gained a new perspective and appreciation for maritime research by experiencing all the shipboard operations he had read about. While at sea he and Lee also observed intriguing backscattering phenomena in the acoustic data; he is looking forward to developing methods to interrogate the scattering source and its role in the ecosystem.