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

             CYBERINFRASTRUCTURE SUMMER INTERNSHIPS 2009 -
       REMINDER: Student Application Deadline is April 13, 2009

http://hackathon.nescent.org/ 
Cyberinfrastructure_Summer_Traineeships_2009

Summer training internships are available for up to four students and  
postdocs interested in informatics as applied to scientific data in  
such fields as 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.

The application deadline for students (April 13, 2009) is approaching  
rapidly.

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 program is 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  
end on 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

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