Macalester College Associate Professor of Computer Science Getiria Onsongo in collaboration with a team of researchers at the University of Minnesota have been working on workforce development activities using U.S. National Science Foundation ACCESS. Specifically, the team has recently developed plans for the 2025 “Food, Agriculture, and U” summer camp that encourages middle school students to learn how their food is grown and the science behind it.

“Our camp was a success last year and we are excited to offer it again this summer,” Onsongo said. “We teach the basics of how agriculture data can be analyzed with computational techniques on supercomputers like those allocated by the ACCESS program.”

He said that the team helped students learn how to use Jetstream2 at Indiana University during last year’s camp and plans to do so again this year. The students extracted DNA from a “mysterious brown food substance” and then sequenced that DNA. Afterward, they matched it with a vast database to determine the original plant identity using a database called Food Data Central. 

“The students were enthralled with these hands-on computational activities via ACCESS and this year will follow the same curriculum,” Onsongo explained. “They also have a chance to tour the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute and learn how a datacenter operates.” 

The overall summer camp was organized by the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute, GEMS Informatics, the College of Food, Agricultural, and Natural Resource Sciences, and the University of Minnesota Genomics Center.

Additional information can be found on the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute website.

Resource Provider Institution(s): Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC), Indiana University
Resources Used: Bridges-2, Jetstream2
Affiliations: Macalester College, University of Minnesota
Funding Agency: NSF
Grant or Allocation Number(s): CIS240305

The science story featured here was enabled by the U.S. National Science Foundation’s ACCESS program, which is supported by National Science Foundation grants #2138259, #2138286, #2138307, #2137603, and #2138296.