DRI Research Immersion Internship Summer 2025
DRI Research Immersion Internship Summer 2025
Internship opportunities driven by career discovery in science, technology, and entrepreneurship
Build new skills, gain exposure to research, and develop your resume for a career in science. This internship program is designed for students at Nevada’s state and community colleges to take the first step in their career in science.
About the Program
The Opportunity
The OpportunityScience at the Desert Research Institute is an immersive opportunity to work hard and grow your professional skills. Broaden your knowledge in ways that contribute to solving the STEM problems of the future.
Learn more about your career field and deepen your experience working on real research in a professional setting. Each year, DRI has opportunities for interns on several different projects. Interns rank their choice of projects and are matched with one of the topics available for that year.
What it Involves
The DRI Research Immersion Internship program will take place during summer 2025 (June 1-August 16). This paid internship involves working with a team dedicated to real-world problem solving with real-world scientists. Interns must be ready to take on new challenges by learning new skills and broadening their knowledge base.
After a guided training period, interns will work closely with mentors and their team members on science, technology, and entrepreneurship-focused projects that will launch both their curiosity and their careers. Students do not have to be enrolled in a science major to apply for the program, however they must be interested in learning about complex science topics.
This program is driven by inclusive excellence, and the target audience for this program is first and second-year students in Nevada’s community and state colleges.
Intern Testimonials
“I really appreciated the opportunities to grow and learn, and my mentors were all so wonderful. I would highly recommend this program to anyone looking to experience real-world research and how the scientific process is implemented in the world outside of school.”
“Based on my experience during this internship, I would absolutely recommend this program to others because it will help them in creating connections with amazing scientists, expand their knowledge in tackling real life environmental issues, and learn to work as a team which is important for any profession moving forward.”
“This semester allowed me to be more confident in a field I had little knowledge about. I met so many new peers and found myself in a new world. I would like other students to discover themselves too.”
Eligibility
- You have already completed high school who are currently enrolled at CSN, GBC, NSU, TMCC, or WNC in any major.
- You are interested in science, technology, engineering, or math.
- You want to take on new challenges, expand your knowledge, and work hard.
- You are dedicated to following through, accountability for your work, maintaining a consistent work schedule.
Commitment
This is an 8-hour per week commitment for the fall semester, up to 112 hours total. The weekly schedule will be determined by the internship mentors once students are selected.
Compensation
Students earn $14/hour for their participation in the internship. Please view on the next tab the commitment for each project (number of hours per week).
Deadline
Applications are due March 30, 2025.
For Current College Students
Opportunities for students enrolled at CSN, GBC, NSU, TMCC, or WNC (who have completed high school).
Current College Students: click here to apply online by March 30, 2025!
Understanding Nevada’s Groundwater: Geospatial Data and Machine Learning
Mentor name: Monty Majumdar, PhD and Roger Putnam, MS 
Apply if you are interested in: Geospatial data management, ArcGIS/ArcPRO
About the project: Reliable solutions for monitoring groundwater levels is crucial for adeptly addressing water management challenges in Nevada. Interns will leverage open-source tools, data, and software for generating high-resolution GWL maps across the Great Basin using machine learning. We will then visually analyze these maps through GIS software and perform basic statistics. The interns will get hands-on training with Jupyter Notebooks (through Google Colab), geospatial data analysis using Python, and spatial machine learning techniques.
Commitment: 17 hours per week
Location: Reno, Nevada
Format: In-person
Dates: June 2 – August 15, 2025
Schedule and other requirements: Students must be available 9am-5pm on Tuesdays for collaborative work. The remaining hours will be determined once interns are selected.
Plastic litter on Lake Tahoe’s Beaches
Mentor name: Monica Arienzo, PhD 
Apply if you are interested in: Water quality, environmental stewardship, pollution reduction, and data management
About the project: Interns on this team will investigate litter on Lake Tahoe’s beaches spatially and temporally using litter collected by a robot run by ECO-CLEAN Solutions. Through the process of assisting with beach clean-ups and quantifying litter data, students will learn to develop and test a hypothesis, analyze and summarize data, and report conclusions. This research will help shed light on the composition of litter on Lake Tahoe’s beaches and litter hotspots.
Commitment: 8 hours per week
Location: Reno, Nevada
Format: In-person
Dates: June 2 – August 15, 2025
Schedule and other requirements: Early mornings (5am) will be required on fieldwork days. Schedules will be determined once students are selected. To apply, you need to have at least two half days (4 hr blocks) or a full day (an 8 hr block) available for the internship, between Monday and Friday during summer 2025.
Health impacts of extreme heat and wildfire smoke
Mentors: Yeongkwon Son, PhD, and Kristin VanderMolen PhD 
Apply if you are interested in:Extreme heat, wildfire smoke, community health risks, learning to conduct interviews and collect physical/mental health and environmental data.
About the project: When heat waves and wildfire smoke occur at the same time, many households face serious challenges for managing the compound effects of both. Interns on this project will work to understand health adaptation needs in households that are vulnerable to these two risk factors. The team will use a combination of interviews and health and environmental data collection with households in Washoe County to inform a study that will look for ways to mitigate vulnerabilities. Interns will be trained in working with human subjects and will be doing home visits for data collection.
Commitment: 8 hours per week
Location: Reno-Sparks, NV
Format: In-person
Dates: June 2-August 15, 2025
Schedule and other requirements:Schedule be set based on interns’ availability. This team will meet in-person for first two weeks for training. Interns are required to have their own transportation to make home visits with study participants.
Is the surface of Mars shaped by ice underneath?
Mentor name: Shannon Hibbard, PhD
Apply if you are interested in: Planetary science, landforms (geomorphology) of Mars, geospatial technologies (e.g., ArcGIS/ArcPro), hypothesis testing with technological tools
About the project: Questions about Mars’ climate history can be answered by looking at the shape of the landforms on its surface (in other words, its geomorphology). The depth of pure ice below Mars’ surface is not known, and answers to these questions are critical to discovering Mars’ climate history and for planning future human exploration. This internship team seeks to discover how small-scale ice-related morphologies on the surface of this planet vary and what their current shape can tell us about how they were formed. Interns on this team will learn to use geospatial analysis tools such as ArcPro (the next generation of ArcGIS) to test hypotheses about Mars’ surface and its history.
Commitment: 8 hours per week
Location: Reno, NV
Format: In-person
Dates: June 2-August 15, 2025
Schedule and other requirements: Wednesday afternoons from 1-5pm, and a five-hour block between 8am-7pm on Fridays.
Ancient landscapes: Lab techniques and field methods for paleohydrology of the Sierra Nevada
Mentor names: Kathleen Rodrigues, PhD and Steve Bacon, PhD
Apply if you are interested in: Age-dating laboratory techniques, geologic mapping, and database management.
About the project: Scientists study landforms to understand important aspects of past climate and water conditions. This project involves processing sediment (soil) samples from key landform types of the Sierra Nevada in the DRI Luminescence Lab (DRILL) to understand the “paleohydrology” or past precipitation and snowpack conditions of the region. The intern will help prepare and measure sediment samples (sieving, acid digestion, mineral separation, rock drilling/slicing) for age determination, learn database management skills, along with learning basic geologic mapping and fieldwork techniques. Work in the DRILL is in limited lighting conditions that are similar to a photographic dark room—low levels of red light. Fieldwork will involve hiking with a backpack, carrying equipment, and sampling sediment.
Commitment: 8 hours per week
Location: Reno, NV
Format: In-person
Dates: June 2-August 15, 2025
Schedule and other requirements: Schedules will be determined based on intern’s availability during business hours. To apply, intern must have two 4-hour blocks or one 8-hour block of time available Monday-Friday.
Program Support
Support for this program is generously provided by the Hearst Foundations and the NIWR Network.
Contact & Deadline
Meghan Collins, M.S.
Meghan.Collins@dri.edu
Application Deadline
30 March 2025