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Category: Department News
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Published: Wednesday, August 20 2025 01:34
When a group of University of Maryland graduate students founded GRAD-MAP in 2013, they hoped the summer program would “change the status quo in physics and astronomy” by providing more students with access to research opportunities.
Skye Joegriner, Jin Young Kim, Ridmi Madarasinghe, Alanis Alvarado Gierbolini, Joanna Chimalilo and Mojisola Akinwande GRAD-MAP summer scholars Skye Joegriner, Jin Young Kim, Ridmi Madarasinghe, Alanis Alvarado Gierbolini, Joanna Chimalilo and Mojisola Akinwande pose for a photo. Image credit: Mark Sherwood.
GRAD-MAP’s summer scholars are undergraduate students at U.S. community colleges and educational institutions where internships in scientific fields might not be offered. Over the course of nine weeks, the scholars conduct research under the guidance of UMD mentors, culminating in a research symposium where they present their findings.
While the program is designed to teach technical skills and show students what a Ph.D. program or research career could look like, GRAD-MAP’s mentors—UMD graduate students, postdocs and faculty members—say the program is mutually beneficial. Some mentors leverage GRAD-MAP to launch ambitious new research projects, while others welcome the opportunity to grow as teachers and project leads.
“One of the best parts of GRAD-MAP is how much we learn from each other,” said Mark Ugalino, a UMD astronomy Ph.D. student and GRAD-MAP mentor and co-lead. “The summer scholars get a real feel for research and life as scientists, while we as graduate leads and mentors gain hands-on experience in managing projects and guiding a team. Our collaboration fosters growth on both sides, which is the heart of GRAD-MAP’s success.”
Read below to see what two mentor-scholar pairs learned from the 2025 GRAD-MAP summer program, which is supported by UMD’s astronomy and physics departments.
Alanis Alvarado Gierbolini, Alberto Bolatto, Serena Cronin and Keaton Donaghue
As a computer science and engineering student at the University of Puerto Rico, Alanis Alvarado Gierbolini entered the GRAD-MAP program with a firm grasp of coding.
“A lot of the students come in with very little coding,” said Serena Cronin, an astronomy Ph.D. student and Alvarado Gierbolini’s co-mentor. “Alanis is the exception. She’s better at coding than I am.”
Those technical skills came in handy when Alvarado Gierbolini joined an ambitious new project led by UMD Astronomy Professor Alberto Bolatto, Cronin and Keaton Donaghue, an astronomy Ph.D. student and GRAD-MAP co-mentor. The research team applied a new algorithm to James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) imagery to understand the physics that gives rise to shapes in the interstellar medium—the cosmic soup of gas and dust between stars.
By running this algorithm, the research team ended up with a series of fractal dimensions: numbers and potentially patterns that could shed light on the complex shapes that appear in space and the processes, such as star formation, that made them that way.
Alvarado Gierbolini applied this novel method to 70 nearby galaxies and said that the process—which involved debugging and rewriting code—taught her how to overcome obstacles and manage her time more efficiently. While she initially felt timid around faculty members and graduate students, she left the program feeling more confident about academia and her place in it.
“You come here, you see grad students and you think they're these extraordinary beings with an unattainable level of smartness,” Alvarado Gierbolini said, “but then you talk to them and the professors and realize, ‘Wow, that could be me someday.’”
The summer scholars don’t just leave the program with new technical skills. Donaghue noted that they also develop a better sense of whether a future in research is right for them.
“The key takeaway for students is to find that they are capable of succeeding in academia as a professional career,” Donaghue said, “or on the flip side, that it’s OK if they discover it isn’t the right path.”
Ridmi Madarasinghe and Ankita Bera
As a postdoctoral associate in UMD’s Department of Astronomy, Ankita Bera typically works on projects with longer timelines. Once she learned about GRAD-MAP, she realized it was the perfect opportunity for a short-term research project she had been wanting to start.
"GRAD-MAP is an excellent program to leverage if you have smaller project ideas, and it benefits both mentors and students," Bera said. "Students gain valuable, hands-on research experience, while we, as mentors, benefit from fresh perspectives and new insights along the way."
Over the summer, Bera mentored Ridmi Madarasinghe, who recently earned an associate’s degree from Montgomery College and will attend UMD this fall as an aerospace engineering major. Together, they used JWST data and advanced computational techniques to better understand reionization, an astrophysical process in which radiation from the first stars and galaxies—roughly 200 to 400 million years after the Big Bang—stripped electrons from hydrogen atoms. This transformed the universe from an opaque, neutral state to the transparent cosmos we observe today.
With a goal of piecing together a timeline of when and how reionization occurred, Madarasinghe learned and applied two parameter inference techniques to a model of reionization, one of which incorporates machine learning methods.
Madarasinghe said GRAD-MAP’s programming not only taught her useful skills but also exposed her to research paths she had never considered. A research lunch chat featuring alum Alyssa Pagan (B.S. ’16, astronomy), who brings JWST images to light as a science visuals developer, was especially eye-opening.
“Being able to hear about the job she is doing and how she got to that position—and hearing it firsthand—was not an experience I would have gotten otherwise,” Madarasinghe said. “Careers like those seem so far off and out of reach, but now they seem a lot more attainable.”
Madarasinghe and Bera plan to continue working together in the fall and hope to publish their results in a journal. For Madarasinghe, she’s excited to see where these experiences will lead her at UMD and beyond.
“This is my first internship, and I feel really lucky to have gotten this experience with GRAD-MAP,” Madarasinghe said. “I also did not expect to have the opportunity to continue this research after the program ends, which is very exciting and opens up a lot of different paths for me.”
Original story: https://cmns.umd.edu/news-events/news/grad-map-students-mentors-learn-each-other
