ARC is participating in In2Research, again!

In2Research is a one-year programme led by In2scienceUK where students are first assigned a mentor and then do an 8-week placement at a research department to learn and experience the academic and research life.

Last year, ARC hosted our first ever placement: Saima Abdus. Saima had just graduated in Pharmacology & Innovative Therapeutic and joined us to learn more about the Research Software Engineering world.
Her project, supervised by Alessandro and David, was to add the brain “atlas” of an Ambystoma mexicanum (or more commonly known as axolotl, one of the cutest animals in the world) into the BrainGlobe project. To be able to do that in 8 weeks, she learnt about version control with Git, got familiar with Python, and understood how brain atlases are stored and catalogued in BrainGlobe and why that is useful for researchers. Her work was featured on the BrainGlobe blog announcing the addition of the axolotl brain to their collection of atlases, as well as presented at two conferences: I2K 2024 – From Images to Knowledge and at the CBIAS 2024 – Crick BioImage Analysis Symposium.

From the amazing experience we had last year, last September we decided to increase the number of offerings for this year, on both, for the mentoring phase and hosting placements. This year we have had five ARC members mentoring six In2research students during the first half of the year (Thanks Dimitra, Duncan, David, Miguel and Ruaridh), and we’ve got four placements in place for this summer (led by David, Matt, Miguel, Tuomas, and Zakaria).

Two of our placements (Hirra and Luthyano) have started last week, and two more (Miles and John) are starting next week.

Hirra, Luthyano, Miles and John will be working on various different projects. Hirra will be using deep learning methods to analyse social-media data, Luthyano will be working with HPC systems to measure the performance of research software, John will be applying AI workflows for eye diagnosis and Miles will be working on predicting error rates of simulated quantum circuits.

Are you more interested to know more about their projects and how they progress? Follow ARC’s in2research journey blog where they will share their learning and achievements with the whole world. Enjoy!