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Student Fellowships

CI Compass Fellowship Program (CICF) for Undergraduates

Students Fellows in CICF learn about real-world cyberinfrastructure challenges, and how to begin solving them for U.S. NSF Major Facilities

Four people stand outside in a lawn in front of a building with the sign for the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory.
CI Compass Fellow Quan Quy, second from left, stands with a team from the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory during his CICF Summer program. / Provided by Quan Quy.

NSF CI Compass, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) Cyberinfrastructure Center of Excellence, offers a distinctive Fellowship Program for undergraduate students pursuing studies in computer science, information science, data science, applied mathematics and statistics, embedded systems, and other related fields.

Cyberinfrastructure, or CI, encompasses computing systems, data storage systems, advanced instruments, data repositories, visualization environments, and people all linked together by software and high-performance networks to improve research productivity and enable breakthroughs otherwise not possible. (1)

The program provides Student Fellows the opportunity to:

  1. Learn about Major/Mid-Scale Facilities (MFs) and their CI development.

  2. Develop CI-related technical skill sets that are important to the work of MFs and apply them through online demos.

  3. Explore real-world CI challenges and career pathways at MFs through recorded guest lectures and optional CI Compass webinars.

CICF is free and open to all Student Fellows. All undergraduate students enrolled in a U.S. institution are eligible to apply.

Use the menu available at the top left of the image to sort through the years of the CICF program to see the variety of colleges and institutions our Fellows come from.

CICF Spring Program

Commit graph illustrating Git branches: main, release, develop, and feature branches.
Screenshot from a recording of the "Git and Coding Standards" lecture with instructor Don Brower.

During the CICF Spring Program, Student Fellows will have access to an asynchronous virtual training program with eleven 1-week modules that have a Technical Skills Component and a Data Lifecycle Component.

The Technical Skills Component of the Spring Program exposes Student Fellows to technical skills relevant to CI such as software engineering, cloud computing, and data workflows, through example demos and quizzes to help fellows practice and test their knowledge. Click here for a sample syllabus for the Spring Program.

The data lifecycle component provides Student Fellows with contextual understanding of the MFs and related CI by learning about the data lifecycle of specific MFs through lectures by guest speakers from MFs and the broader CI community.

“Cyberinfrastructure is often invisible, but it is essential to almost every major scientific discovery today. CICF gives students the opportunity to see that connection firsthand—to take what they are learning and apply it to real scientific challenges. That combination of learning, contribution, and impact is incredibly rewarding,” says Ewa Deelman, CI Compass PI.

Check out a sample CICF Syllabus here

Read what CICF alumni are saying: Student Fellow Testimonials

Visit the CICF Apply page for more information

Need more information?

The CI Compass Fellowship Program is directed by Angela Murillo, Director of CICF, and Nicole Virdone, CI Compass Director of Outreach. For more information on the program, please email cicf@ci-compass.org.

1 Stewart, C.A., Sims, S., Plale, B., Link, M., Hancock, D.Y., and Fox, G.C. (2010). What is Cyberinfrastructure? Proceedings for SIGUCCS’10. Norfolk, Virginia.

National Science Foundation

This project is supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure in the Directorate for Computer Information Science under Grant #2127548.