CSIRE: Cultivating High School Researchers

It was a busy summer for a small group of selected high school students participating in Stony Brook
University’s Computer Science and Informatics Summer Research Experience Program (CSIRE). CSIRE
is an intensive six week summer research program that ran from Monday, June 27 to Friday, August 5,
2022 and was held jointly by the Department of Biomedical Informatics (BMI) and the Department of
Computer Science (CS) at Stony Brook University.

​

With great enthusiasm, Prof. Fusheng Wang spearheaded the program for a wonderful incoming group of
students eager to learn alongside our prestigious faculty!

This was a very competitive application year, as the program received a record number of 155
applications with a total of only 31 available seats. Compared to 2021, where a total of 93 applications
were received. Top student applications were received from over 15 different states and two foreign
countries/regions. These included Arkansas, Arizona, California, Delaware, Illinois, Minnesota, Poland,
Taiwan, Texas, and Washington. Approximately 50% of the applicants were female.

To increase involvement of U.S. Veteran families, SBU offered a scholarship through support from the
National Science Foundation to one student this year who is a dependent of a military veteran. This
scholarship is offered to students who have one or both parents as veterans (gold star parents, active
duty, or retired military).

Programming skills are required to apply and preparations for the program began over one month before
the start. Each mentor typically asks their student (s) to prepare such skills through tutorials and to
familiarize themselves with the necessary tools before the program begins so that they can really hit the
ground running on day one.

These highly motivated high school students were hard at work gaining valuable research knowledge
from 18 Stony Brook University faculty. They worked during the summer honing their interest in fields

such as visualization, networking and security, machine learning, data science, biomedical informatics,
human computer interaction, and more!

In addition to one-on-one mentoring, students participated in six research seminars, three career
seminars, and an on-campus lab tour.

Not only was this a record setting year for total applications received, we had a record setting number of
faculty serving as mentors from CS, BMI, applied mathematics and statistics, electrical and computer
engineering, and civil engineering.

Computer science professors mentoring students this year included:

  • Xiaojun Bi
  • David Gu
  • Michael Ferdman
  • Shubham Jain
  • Dongyoon Lee
  • Haibin Ling
  • Shuai Mu
  • Klaus Mueller
  • Amir Rahmati

Department of Biomedical Informatics:

  • Ramana Davuluri
  • Prateek Prasanna
  • Romeil Sandhu
  • Fusheng Wang (also CS)

Electrical and Computer Engineering Department:

  • Ji Liu
  • Fan Ye

Department of Civil Engineering:

  • Ruwen Qin
  • Susu Xu

Department of Applied Mathematics & Statistics:

  • Zhenhua Liu

As with previous years, the hope is that the students continue their research either at Stony Brook University or another institution. A CSIRE mentee in 2018 did just that. Stimulated by the program, former CSIRE student Christopher Moore joined Stony Brook University to continue research as an undergraduate. He recently published this first-author research paper, FPGA Correlator for Applications in Embedded Smart Devices, https://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/ureca/feature/_bio/2022/June2022.

Thank you notes from students were received acknowledging how grateful they were to be given the opportunity to learn and experience the program.