MURPA Students
Monash Undergraduate Research Projects Abroad (MURPA) - International Research Internships at the University of Queensland and Monash University
In today's educational arena, universities must provide students with opportunities to work and study abroad to prepare them for global citizenship and professional competence in a multi-cultural workplace. Numerous reports have challenged universities to develop educational programs that provide an integrated academic basis for developing students' cultural/global competencies.
Since 2008, 42 Monash University students have travelled to international partners under the Monash Undergraduate Research Projects Abroad program (MURPA). They are selected for the program the year prior to their research internships, hence, those chosen in 2015 travelled in 2016, etc. They have travelled to the University of California, San Diego, the National Center for Supercomputing Research in Illinois, The Technion in Israel, the Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R) in Singapore and the University of Warwick. Students are placed for a period of 8 weeks, allowing them to integrate into the research groups as team members. Students have a local mentor in Australia as well as one in the remote site, and often bridge international research projects.
To date, UC San Diego has hosted 30 MURPA students:
2016 | |
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William Donohoe Mentor: Dr. Winston Armstrong Project Title: Microgrid security and automated assessment |
Tyson Ray Jones Mentor: Professor Frank Wuerthwein Project Title: Condorflux; modern metric collection |
Lachlan Smith Mentor: Dr. Jurgen Schulze Project Title: PlayStation Move on Windows |
Lucina Togno Mentor: Dr. Ilkay Altintas Project Title: Workflow task modelling and scheduling |
2015 | |
Hayden Razzell Mentor: Dr. Ilkay Altintas Project Title: Scientific Workflows for Bioinformatics |
Troy Smith Mentor: Dr. Yifeng Cui Project Title: Earthquake Modelling |
2014 | |
Jie Liu Mentor: Dr. Mark Miller Project Title: CIPRES Gateway Usage Analysis |
James Macindoe Mentor: Dr. Ilkay Altintas Project Title: WiFire Android App |
Jonathan Samosir Mentor: Dr. Sameer Tilak Project Title: A real time data stream processing system for enabling patient tailored healthcare |
Brian Song Mentor: Dr. Andrea Chiba Project Title: Computation Time Scales in iRat-Rat Social Interactions |
2013 | |
Rui Jie Chow Mentor: Dr. Robert Sinkovits Project Title: Extending GSOM to the Gordon Supercomputer |
Jared Griffiths Mentor: Dr. Ilkay Altintas Project Title: Performing MapReduce tasks in Kepler using Nimrod/K |
Tim Telfer Mentor: Dr. Sameer Tilak Project Title: Automating the Deployment and Management of Software Stacks For Ad-Hoc Wireless Sensor Network Devices |
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2012 | |
John Bell Mentor: Professor Philip Bourne Project Title: Increasing utility of and awareness in SciVee |
Satvik Kumar Mentor: Dr. Robert Sinkovits Project Title: Extending GSOM to HPC systems |
Thomas Moore Mentor: Dr. Sameer Tilak Project Title: An automated approach for the systems definition of ad hoc wireless sensor networks |
Minh Ngoc Nhat Huynh Mentor: Dr. Philip Papadopoulos Project Title: Approaches to author Rocks virtual machine in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud |
2011 | |
Wai Keung Yiu Man Lung Mentor: Dr. Ilkay Altintas Project Title: Binding ITK with Kepler for Medical Workflow Imaging |
Geoff Pascoe Mentor: Dr. Sameer Tilak Project Title: Cross Network Platform for Environmental Sensor Data Capture and Analysis |
Lin Wei Mentor: Dr. Wilfred Li Project Title: Integrating Web Services, Nimrod and Kepler in Biomedical Workflows |
James Wetter Mentor: Dr. Jurgen Schulze Project Title: Real Time Visualisation in Astrophysics |
2010 | |
Jonathan McClure Mentor: Professor Mike Norman Project Title: Project Title: Data Mining Galaxies for Bullet Clusters |
Ben Morgan Mentor: Professor Andrew McCulloch Project Title: Visualization of Tensor Data in Cardiac Models |
Aisa Na'Im Mentor: Dr. Ilkay Altintas Project Title: Data Quality Monitor for Scientific Workflows |
Andrew Paterson Mentor: Dr. Jurgen Schulze Project Title: Interactively Viewing Density Fields |
2009 | |
Nicholas Barnes Mentors: Professors Andrew McCulloch and Roy Kerckhoffs Project Title: HPC Performance Improvement in Cardiac Modelling |
Li Guanghua (Aimee) Mentor: Dr. Wilfred Li Project Title: Avian Flu Drug Discovery |
Hoang Nguyen Mentor: Dr. Ilkay Altintas Project Title: Interfacing Kepler Scientific Workflows and Optiportals |
Peter Serwylo Mentor: Dr. Jurgen Schulze Project Title: Spatial Visualisation for Urban Modelling |
MURPA and QURPA involve an advanced seminar scheme, in which students can attend virtual seminars given by world leading experts before they leave. These seminars also allow students to "meet" potential UCSD mentors and get some information about potential projects. In 2016 the seminar series focused on an all female cast of presenters. At the time of writing this report, six students have been selected at Monash for the upcoming MURPA 2016/2017 round, and two UQ students are yet to be chosen.
Seminars were sourced from UCSD, Intel, University of Delaware, the University of Notre Dame, the University of Southern California, the University of Chicago, the University of Colorado Boulder, Brown University, the University of Tennessee, the University of Utah, SDSC. As done in the past, seminars were broadcast simultaneously to Monash (in Melbourne) and UQ (in Brisbane), with audiences able to ask questions from either venue. The seminar infrastructure supports a wide range of video conference technologies (both open source and commercial), and is displayed on a 20 MPixel OptiPortal.