USCB’s Lingtao Chen Chosen for Prestigious SULI Research Program
Increasingly, students from University of South Carolina Beaufort are being rewarded
for their hard work with exceptional national and international opportunities, and
Lingtao Chen is one of USCB’s highest achievers. A Spring 2021 graduate who double
majored in Computational Science and Mathematics, Lingtao was selected for the U.S.
Department of Energy's prestigious Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internship (SULI)
program. He’s currently an intern with Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
The SULI program encourages undergraduate students and recent graduates to pursue science, technology, engineering, and mathematics careers by providing research experiences at one of 17 participating DOE laboratories/facilities. SULI interns work under the guidance of laboratory staff scientists or engineers on projects supporting the DOE mission.
Dr. Eric Skipper, Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at University of South Carolina Beaufort, congratulated Lingtao for this honor.
“You will do incredible things and we are very proud of you,” Skipper said. “You add to the growing USCB legacy of securing nationally competitive internships and fellowships.”
Lingtao’s success is even more impressive because English isn’t his first language. From Hujiang, a small island in the Fujian province in southeast China, he moved to the U.S. with his family when he was a freshman in high school. They spent a short time in Massachusetts and then moved to the South Carolina Lowcountry, where he graduated from Beaufort High School. Lingtao — the first in his family to attend college—chose to study at USCB because his parents rely on his language skills and he wanted to stay close to home.
For Lingtao, the SULI internship is the culmination of years of keen interest in math and computers.
“I loved math and solving math problems from a very young age, so I first pursued a math degree at USCB. I got interested in computer science when I took a course about MATLAB. I found out that I love to write code,” he said. “In this internship, I am able to learn from top scholars on research topics that I am interested in.”
Federally funded research and development center Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is in Tennessee, but due to COVID Lingtao’s internship is virtual. His research employs process mining, a field of data science that allows investigators to discover, visualize and analyze processes from computational event logs. He is analyzing data about sepsis from hospital emergency rooms. Eventually, ORNL researchers will combine process mining and machine learning approaches to create statistical models that will help doctors and nurses work together for better patient outcomes.
Almost every day, Lingtao meets with his mentor at ORNL, and often with the Senior Program Manager overseeing the group of student researchers.
At USCB, Lingtao credits Dr. Fusi, Dr. Canada, Dr. DebRoy, Dr. Sanders, Dr. Pawelek, Dr. Liang, Dr. Erdei, Dr. Ahmed, and Dr. Zhang for preparing him for this opportunity through their excellent teaching. He gives special thanks to Dr. DebRoy and Dr. Canada, who wrote his letters of recommendation for the SULI program.
Lingtao, who is 23, hopes to continue his internship at ORNL in the spring semester and then apply for graduate school.