For the fourth year the Rosalind Franklin Institute has hosted summer interns as part of the Health Data Research internship programme. This year Semhar Misghina and Melissa Mitchell joined the Artificial Intelligence and Informatics team throughout July and August hosted by Elaine Ho and Laura Shemilt. At the Franklin, Semhar and Melissa worked towards developing a reporting system to assess the quality of cryo-electron tomography datasets, this tool enables researchers to examine a variety of quality metrics at different stages of the experimental protocol. This will allow researchers to make adjustments to their protocol during the process if metrics are not at the required level, saving time by reducing the need to repeat the protocol from scratch.
Semhar, a second year PhD student at Queen Mary University of London, and Melissa, a fourth year PhD student at King’s College London, both found working with the team at the Franklin to be their favourite aspect of their internships. “It’s more collective, it’s not just you on your own with a problem” said Semhar, “I can bounce off ideas that Melissa has from her background and from Elaine’s experience. So, we all have three very different computational experiences coming together for one sort of computational problem”. Semhar also added “All the people are so nice, and they really want to give their input and also give advice. And it was great to hear about how their paths led them to where they are right now”.
Melissa spoke about her potential career path after she finishes her PhD and how the internship has influenced this, “I think it’s definitely opened my eyes that research software engineering is something that I can actually do, and it’s what I want to do. I am heavy on building software, I think that’s my strong suit. Speaking to Laura, she suggested that I become a research software engineer. She also recommended a society that allows you to go to different conferences. So this definitely has shaped what I want to do after my PhD”. Melissa will also be taking part in this year’s HPC cluster challenge with the Franklin’s team “Most Significant Bit”.
Elaine Ho commented “Melissa and Semhar have been brilliant additions to the team during their time here at the Franklin. In their work, they have demonstrated excellent data science and software engineering skills to contribute to the research we do at the Franklin in cryo-electron tomography”.