The Andersen Lab is delighted to welcome five new interns from the Scripps Research Translational Institute (SRTI) Student Research Internship Program (SRIP)! These aspiring scientists were selected from a highly competitive pool of over 1,000 high school, undergraduate, and graduate applicants. Throughout the summer, each intern will collaborate closely with a lab mentor to gain hands-on experience applying computational methods to study the emergence, spread, and dynamics of infectious diseases.
The 2026 Cohort
Joohyeun Kim joins the lab from South Korea, where she is a senior majoring in Computer Science at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). Mentored by Josh Levy and Maryam Ahmadi, she is working on our agent-based outbreak simulation project to better understand the relationship between clinical and wastewater surveillance data and how they can be used to mitigate outbreak risk. She is developing observation models to simulate realistic data collection and its use for public health response, including the utility of different types of surveillance for rapid deployment of interventions, and simulating potential intervention strategies. Outside the lab, she produces music, swims, and loves to cook.
Vivek Mav is joining the team virtually as a rising senior at Green Level High School in Cary, North Carolina. Working alongside mentor James McFeeters, Vivek is annotating the avian influenza genome with structural information about antigenic sites to analyze mutations. In his free time, he enjoys playing and listening to music, graphic design and video editing in Photoshop, and playing video games with friends.
Christine Oh is a rising junior at Bergen County Academies in Hackensack, New Jersey. This summer, she is working with mentor Eleanor Chen to build an AI agent that interfaces with outbreak.info, pulling data from the API endpoint to generate automated summaries and data visualizations. Her hobbies include hiking, taking walks with her dog, and spending time with friends and family.
Trinity Kwon is a rising fourth-year undergraduate at the University of Washington in Seattle, where she studies Informatics and Public Health-Global Health. Mentored by Praneeth Gangavarapu, Trinity is developing an LLM-based embedding pipeline. Her project leverages publicly available literature and Deep Mutational Scanning data to predict the phenotypic effects of mutations in current H5N1 strains. In her free time, she likes to hike with her dog, watch K-dramas, and bake or cook gluten-free dishes.
Ratnim Garg is an incoming fourth-year Bioinformatics undergraduate student at the University of California, San Diego. Also mentored by Praneeth Gangavarapu, Ratnim’s summer project focuses on studying the mutations and evolutionary pressures observed in H5N1 among avian species, comparing them directly to the recent H5N1 cattle outbreak. Outside of her research, she loves playing video games, sculpting clay creatures, and reading.
Beyond their individual projects, the program offers these students the opportunity to fully integrate into the lab community, participate in journal clubs, and hone their scientific presentation skills. The summer will conclude with the interns presenting the independent research projects they developed alongside their mentors. We look forward to seeing the results of all their hard work!