Excellence Recognized at 2022 Research Park Intern Awards
The Research Park celebrated its 16th annual Intern Awards Ceremony and Picnic to honor and recognize the outstanding work done by the student interns across the Park’s 120+ companies.
The ceremony was held on Thursday, July 28, National Intern Day, which gave us all the more reason to host a celebration for the 800+ interns working throughout Research Park.
This was the first year the ceremony was held in person since 2019.
The students recognized as finalists and winners are comprised of a variety of disciplines, majors, and colleges from across the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, representing the type of cross-curricular work that takes place at Research Park companies.
These interns were able to make connections with their peers, co-workers, and supervisors that will last a lifetime, and they have sharpened skills that will aid them for years to come, in both their personal and professional lives.
They have impacted the faces of our companies and the fabric of the Research Park through their hard work and innovation.
Thank you to the managers and supervisors who nominated their interns, and an additional thank you to the panel of professionals who determined the honorees. This year, there were six awards presented.
Award Categories:
- Best Entrepreneurial Leadership in a Startup
- Best Technical Innovation
- Best Business Innovation
- Most Outstanding Undergraduate Student Intern
- Most Outstanding Graduate Student Intern
- Most Competent and Collaborative Team
Best Entrepreneurial Leadership in a Startup
Winner:
Shivam Tailor – Natrion Laboratory Assistant
Undergraduate in Material Science and Engineering | Grainger College of Engineering
“Shivam has an eagerness to learn as much as possible and apply it towards the success of the company. Shivam was the only intern to have his own project, and not only did he take charge of every aspect of it, but he excelled rapidly. Within two months on the job, Shiv produced single-crystal NMC and artificial graphite tapes that are viable for commercial use, a process that is extremely long and arduous that requires painstaking optimization. Shivam is very meticulous. He has excellent attention to detail that was critical in his success in the project.”
Finalists:
Sarah Hashim – TipTek Engineering Intern
Undergraduate in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering | College of Liberal Arts & Sciences
Tianshu Wei – LifeFoundry Embedded Systems Intern
Undergraduate in Computer Science | Grainger College of Engineering
Best Technical Innovation
Winner:
Teja Gupta – Corteva Agriscience Remote Sensing Scientist
Graduate in Computer Engineering
“Teja worked on cloud masking, an important and emerging technique that is a valuable addition to our organization and the global agriculture community. He created a classifier tool and later a software package inspired by the original cloud masks. This is an extraordinary feat considering the complexity of the situation. During this project, Teja demonstrated outstanding innovation, perseverance and humility resulting in a solution that addressed an existing problem. He also demonstrated a great deal of perseverance when creating a new dataset since it took a lot of trial and error to succeed in this task.”
Finalists:
Elizabeth Atkinson – Starfire Industries Electrical Engineering Intern
Undergraduate in Electrical Engineering | Grainger College of Engineering
Ved Shah – COUNTRY Financial DigitaLab Software Developer Intern
Undergraduate in Computer Science | Grainger College of Engineering
Best Business Innovation
Winner:
Cindy Phung – Cargill UX/UI Design Intern
Undergraduate in Graphic Design | College of Fine & Applied Arts
“Cindy is the sole designer on a 3-person intern team that is working on a Cargill Protein North America project tied to our Factory of the Future Initiative, a tool that leverages data to make predictions about potential safety risks on the factory floor that day. Cindy’s role has been to discover, design and prototype the views of that data and the ways the various fabrication floor managers log the response they plan to take. Cindy has set the bar high given the thoroughness of her research, professionalism of her designs, technical acumen behind her designs also being feasible and communication skills to socialize and persuade others on her ideas.”
Finalists:
Eric Goff – ADM Modeling Intern
Undergraduate in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering | College of Liberal Arts & Sciences
Ethan Rasmussen – AbbVie Business Analyst Intern
Undergraduate in Information Systems | Gies College of Business
Most Outstanding Undergraduate Student Intern
Winner:
David An – Ameren Data Science Intern
Undergraduate in Mathematics | College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
“This summer, David was a key player in many initiatives on our data science team at the Ameren Innovation Center. David was Project Lead on their Electric Vehicle Analysis project where he took complex business needs and transformed them into actionable results. All summer, David was the first intern to show up at the office every day and he was laser-focused on his projects. He was hungry to gain experience leading people. He wanted to improve himself, both technically and as a leader. Seeing such humility and desire to grow out of an intern is impressive. Along with his drive and work ethic, he added so much to the in-person intern experience with his jokes and levity. David is such an outstanding intern that he makes me a better manager.”
Finalists:
Ben Avila – State Farm Actuarial Intern
Undergraduate in Actuarial Science | College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Madison Park – Cargill UX/UI Design Intern
Undergraduate in Information Science | School of Information Sciences
Most Outstanding Graduate Student Intern
Winner:
Natalie Xiong – Riverbed Data Science Intern
Graduate in Psychology | College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
“If Natalie has a goal in mind, she will absolutely accomplish it. Natalie is super collaborative – she listens to the opinions of others, and she is considerate and respectful to all colleagues around her. For her summer internship she essentially acted as a data science consultant where her work has helped improve a complex AI/ML product that aims to automatically find and fix IT problems for Riverbed’s customers, many of whom are fortune 500 companies. Natalie is very investigative, which ultimately led to her internship success because she learned technical concepts very quickly.”
Finalists:
Brendan Brasch – AbbVie Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Developer Intern
Graduate in Bioengineering | Grainger College of Engineering
Mengfei Lan – Corteva Agriscience Deep Learning for Metabolism Prediction Intern
Graduate in Information Science | School of Information Sciences
Raina Monaghan – State Farm Enterprise Research Intern
Graduate in Geographic Information Systems
Most Competent and Collaborative Team
Winner:
Caterpillar’s Living Machine Logistics Team:
Anwita Balineni – Data Analytics Intern
Undergraduate in Information Science | School of Information Sciences
Sam Erens – Data Analytics Intern
Undergraduate in Applied Mathematics | College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Dhwani Desai – Data Analytics Intern
Graduate in Information Systems | Gies College of Business
Prayag Patel - Data Analytics Intern
Graduate in Information Management | School of Information Sciences
“The team had a very challenging task of increasing the efficiency of the machine learning model they built over the year to predict the orders and demand for various machine parts that are fulfilled by Caterpillar’s dealers and distribution centers. Each member took responsibility and completed different tasks including automation, exploratory data analysis to deal with data quality issues and perform data cleaning and preprocessing. The team managed to improve the efficiency of the model for both dealer stores and distribution centers. The same model which took around an hour for dealer stores now takes around 25 minutes and the model which took around 10 hours for distribution centers now takes only 1.5 hours. The team worked like a well-oiled machine and delivered, akin to Caterpillar’s machines all over the globe!”
Finalists:
Brunswick i-Jet CES Team:
Charlie Du – CG Software Developer Intern
Undergraduate in Computer Science | Grainger College of Engineering
Brendan Parmer – CG Software Developer Intern
Undergraduate in Computer Science and Mathematics | College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Meghan Reynolds – CG Software Developer Intern
Undergraduate in Computer Science and Philosophy | College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Jaliu Sun – CG Software Developer Intern
Graduate in Entertainment Technology
Girish Tiwari – Engineering Software Developer Intern
Undergraduate in Computer Science | Grainger College of Engineering
Procter & Gamble Smart Lab Operations Team:
Luke Boelke – Operations Specialist
Undergraduate in Computer Engineering | Grainger College of Engineering
Carly Eberhart – Operations Specialist
Undergraduate in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering | College of Liberal Arts and Sciences
Lorraine Jamison – Operations Specialist
Undergraduate in Material Science and Engineering | Grainger College of Engineering
Endri Kono – Operations Specialist
Undergraduate in Accounting | Gies College of Business
Andrew Osepek – Operations Specialist
Undergraduate in Computer Engineering | Grainger College of Engineering
Photos from the event can be viewed through our media gallery.