University of Rhode Island

I'm Calli Dunn, a rising Sophomore from New Jersey. I am studying Ocean Engineering while here at URI. This summer I had the fortunate opportunity of doing a research related summer internship. This research opportunity has been an extremely valuable experience for me as I am beginning to explore future career paths that I am interested in.
 

In my first semester at URI, I took an entry level engineering course designed to pique our interest in the different engineering majors and begin familiarizing ourselves with the design process. I was extremely lucky that my professor for this class happened to be a PhD student who was also pursuing her degree in Ocean Engineering, Professor Lopez Case. I spoke to her about my interests many times throughout the class and picked her brain about what she was looking to pursue. At my previous high school, I performed my own research experiments each year and was successful at presenting my projects at both local and regional science fairs. My professor was delighted to hear that I already had some research experience of my own when I expressed my interest in getting involved in research while at school. She noted the effort I put into my work in the class and reached out during the spring semester with a potential research opportunity for the summer.
 

Professor Lopez Case specifically studies underwater acoustics as a part of Professor Miller's lab. This area of research oftentimes involves a background in coding or levels of familiarity with it. Once data is collected from the field, our job as researchers is to take the information and perform a series of data processing steps to analyze the data. During my spring semester this year, I took a coding course to become more proficient in MatLab, a common programming language utilized by many engineering disciplines. After taking this class, I was familiar enough with MatLab and understood basic commands, graphs, and formulas. All of the projects I worked on this summer used MatLab to analyze various sets of data. Due to the flexibility of coding, I was able to work on all of my projects from home this summer.
 

Towards the end of May, I started off my research internship with learning more complex commands in MatLab. My first project involved learning how to convert different types of data into a form MatLab can read. I then learned how to find the frequencies of the sound I sampled and plot the waveform of the sound. In more recent months, I have learned how to plot data in the form of a spectrogram, a graph that visually displays the strength of a signal over time at various frequencies. Lately, I have worked on analyzing how sound is picked up from a receiver that is a couple thousand meters away from a disturbance. My most recent project has been to plot the location of the receiver and disturbance on a map through MatLab. This line of research is utilized by many different types of organizations, including the U.S. Navy and offshore wind farm companies. This has been an invaluable experience and I am beyond grateful for the opportunity to learn more about underwater acoustics and pieces of ocean engineering. I hope to continue research while at school this coming semester as well as over the next couple of years.