Duke ECE Welcomes 6 Summer Interns from IIT

This summer, Duke’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) welcomed six students from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) educational system as part of an ongoing collaboration.

First started in 2012 as a result of discussions between IIT-Gandhinagar (IIT-GN) Director Sudhir Jain and Duke ECE Professor Kishor Trivedi, the program brings students to the Pratt School of Engineering to spend the summer gaining research experience as interns to ECE faculty.

The prospective interns submit applications at their home institutes, and, when possible, Professors Trivedi and Krishnendu Chakrabarty meet with students’ advisors and interview students to determine their interests and fits with faculty in Duke’s ECE department. The experience is much like a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program, where the students are on campus for nine weeks while earning a typical REU stipend and being provided with travel support and housing.

To date, the program has brought 22 students from various IIT campuses. Although Duke has a special relationship with IIT-GN, the program has drawn from other IIT campuses as well, including IIT-Kanpur and IIT-Kharagpur. A number of the interns have applied for graduate study at Duke, including two current students working toward their graduate degrees at Duke.

This year’s interns come from three IIT campuses and are working with six different ECE professors. They are working on a variety of projects, from datacenter design and deployment, to printing nanomaterials into thin films, and even collaborating with engineers at North Carolina State University. The IIT interns, along with other summer REU students, presented the results of their research projects from the summer at a poster session held on July 22, 2016.