*** Please disseminate widely to students at your institution ***

             CYBERINFRASTRUCTURE SUMMER TRAINEESHIPS 2009

                       VIRTUAL DATA CENTER FOR
    BIODIVERSITY, EARTH, ECOLOGICAL, AND EVOLUTIONARY SCIENCE DATA

http://hackathon.nescent.org/Cyberinfrastructure_Summer_Traineeships_2009

Summer traineeships are available for up to four students and postdocs  
interested in informatics as applied to scientific data ranging from  
the fields of biodiversity, ecology, and evolutionary biology. The  
program provides a unique opportunity for undergraduate, masters, and  
PhD students as well as postdocs to obtain hands-on experience writing  
and extending open-source software as part of a distributed  
collaborative software development team building a Virtual Data Center  
(VDC) that includes major data and metadata repositories in those  
fields.

Trainees accepted into the program will receive a stipend ($4,500),  
and with the exception of attending one meeting near the beginning and  
one near the end of the 3-month program period may work from their  
home, or home institution. Travel costs incurred in connection with  
the meetings will be reimbursed. Each student will have at least one  
dedicated mentor to show them the ropes and help them complete their  
project.

Initial project ideas are listed on the website. These range from  
validation of metadata and identifier resolution, to supporting LSID  
and semantic-web compliant PURLs for digital data objects, to  
implementing modern web-service APIs, to cataloging the diversity of  
metadata schemas. The project ideas are flexible and can be adjusted  
in scope to match the skills of the student. We also welcome novel  
project ideas that dovetail with student interests.

The traineeships are supported by a National Science Foundation (NSF)  
grant to a consortium of major repositories for biodiversity, earth  
and environmental, ecological, and evolutionary science. The  
consortium includes the LTER Network Office, the U.S. Geological  
Survey, NASA and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Global  
Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), the National Evolutionary  
Synthesis Center(NESCent), and the National Center for Ecological  
Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS). It aims to develop the  
cyberinfrastructure and technologies necessary to build a Virtual Data  
Center (VDC) based on a network of existing and new physical  
repositories ("nodes") that interoperate using open standards and  
protocols. The network will enable discovery of as well as open,  
stable, and secure access to data in any of its member nodes.

TO APPLY: Students apply online. Instructions for applying are at the  
website (see "When you apply"), along with program rules and  
eligibility requirements.  The 15-day application period for students  
opens on Monday March 30th and runs through Monday, April 13th, 2009.

INQUIRIES: vdc-twg {at} ecoinformatics {dot} org. We strongly  
encourage all interested students to get in touch with us with their  
ideas as early as possible.

Cyberinfrastructure Traineeships Website:
http://hackathon.nescent.org/Cyberinfrastructure_Summer_Traineeships_2009

2009 NESCent Phyloinformatics Summer of Code (NESCent's participation  
in the Google Summer of Code; managed separately; postdocs not  
eligible; ***student application period ends April 3rd***)
http://hackathon.nescent.net/Phyloinformatics_Summer_of_Code_2009

To sign up for quarterly NESCent newsletters: http://www.nescent.org/about/contact.php

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Todd Vision and Hilmar Lapp
National Evolutionary Synthesis Center
http://nescent.org