Participating Illinois units, including several departments across the Urbana campus, including Nuclear, Plasma, and Radiological Engineering (NPRE), the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, Bioengineering (BIOE), and the MGH Gordon Center for Medical Imaging (GCMI) have established the Illinois-MGH Molecular Imaging Summer Internship open for up to six Illinois students per year. Through the two-month internship at MGH, students will work with GCMI faculty:
- On collaborative research projects
- To develop joint publications
- To produce preliminary results for future research proposals
- To interact with other MGH faculties, students and trainees.
GCMI will provide each student two months of summer accommodation in Boston, as well as a $1,000-per-month stipend to cover travel costs and partial living expenses.
The deadline for Summer 2016 internships is March 1, 2016. To apply, students are encourage to work with their research advisors to identify one or more potential faculty collaborators at MGH, as well as a potential research topic that fits the research interests of all parties. Potential interns also should submit a one-page abstracted to NPRE Associate Prof. Ling-Jian Meng at ljmeng@illinois.edu with the following information:
- The student’s contact details and affiliation
- Names of the collaborating faculties from Illinois and from MGH
- A brief description (less than 500 characters) of the potential research project(s) in which the student would like to participate.
Meng’s PhD student, Guan-Feng Gao, was the first NPRE student enrolled in the 2015 summer internships. Gao worked with Professor Quanzheng Li at MGH on the development of data processing and image reconstruction techniques for studying neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, based on state-of-art PET/MR imaging systems.
Said Meng, “We hope that this newly established Illinois-MGH summer internship can provide a unique opportunity for UIUC students to prepare for their future career in clinical research and the biomedical industry, and can help research groups at UIUC and MGH to initiate future collaborative research projects.” Illinois students and faculty could find potential collaboration areas, participating faculties, and procedures for application through the UIUC-MGH Partnership on Radiological Sciences and Molecular Imaging website.