Internships

Pacific northwest bioMedical Innovation Co-laboratory (PMedIC) offers OHSU graduate students and postdocs—working in areas of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) expertise—the opportunity to participate in highly customized research experiences. Internships help students advance their research and careers.

Connect with us about an internship

Experience a rare internship opportunity at a national laboratory, where you will get to work in state-of-the-art facilities, and receive mentorship from world-class experts. Virtual internships often focus on data analysis methods, while in-person internships allow for hands-on experience with laboratory equipment that may not be availableelsewhere..

All internships must be funded by and initiated with the full support of your OHSU advisor or graduate program lead.

The first step is a meeting with the PMedIC Education Outreach Coordinator. To prepare for the conversation, please email us with the following information:

  1. Program Details: Please indicate your research program, what year you are in, and how the proposed internship will fit within your program’s timelines.
  2. Training and Research Goals: Please address your training and research, how your goals may align with your OHSU thesis and/or educational program, and why interning with PNNL may be a valuable opportunity for you (in terms of collaboration with a principal investigator, capabilities as a laboratory, or facilities).
  3. Expertise: Provide an overview of your current expertise and research project(s) or interests. Our goal is to understand what background you may bring into this internship.
  4. Current Collaborations: Have you already had conversations with a PNNL researcher related to this idea? If so, what background or context could you share that would be helpful for us to understand?
  5. Faculty Mentor and/or Program Support: We work in partnership with OHSU faculty mentors or educational programs to champion OHSU trainees' experiences. Please address whether you have discussed this with your faculty mentor and/or educational program and whether you have established any shared goals or outcomes related to this internship potential.

Past Interns

Past trainees have worked with their OHSU mentor or advisor and PNNL contact to create internships for a variety of experiences, including:

Development of graph-based methods to improve the processing of cryo-electron tomography

Intern: August George (Ph.D. candidate)

OHSU advisor: Dr. Daniel Zuckerman

PNNL Mentor: Dr. Margaret Cheung

Network-based analyses for multi-omics data

Intern: Dr. Itallia Pacentine (MSc candidate)

PNNL Mentor: Dr. Jason McDermott

Applications in cancer bioinformatics

Intern: Brian Karlberg (Ph.D. candidate)

OHSU Advisor: Dr. Kyle Elrott

PNNL Mentor: Dr. Sara Gosline

Computational methods for predicting protein function

Intern: Justine Nguyen (MSc candidate)

OHSU Advisor: Dr.  Jonathan Pruneda

PNNL Mentor: Dr. Jason McDermott

Read about Justine’s experience: PMedIC Empowers Students in Biomedicine

Since our internships are customized to the individual, educational status, and their project, we expect the experience of training at PNNL to bring lasting benefits.