The new apprenticeship is built on NY Creates’ existing Industrial Manufacturing Technician Registered Apprenticeship Program, a state-registered training framework that combines paid on-the-job experience with structured technical instruction. Registered Apprenticeships of this kind are governed by standards set in collaboration with the New York State Department of Labor, which is serving as a sponsor of the initiative through the Center for Economic Growth. In this configuration, apprentices do not simply shadow experienced workers; they progress through a defined curriculum of competencies, accumulating documented hours and demonstrated skills across the equipment, processes, and safety protocols that define modern semiconductor manufacturing environments.

Over the sixteen-month duration of the program, the ten apprentices will be embedded in a training ecosystem that spans several institutions. They will work alongside Micron mentors and employees, gaining direct exposure to the practices and expectations of a leading memory manufacturer. They will complete programmatic coursework provided by Hudson Valley Community College, an institution with a long history of preparing students for careers in semiconductor and advanced manufacturing. And they will receive hands-on, advanced research and development training at the Albany NanoTech Complex, operated by NY Creates, where public-private partnerships have produced some of the most advanced semiconductor R&D infrastructure available anywhere in the academic or industrial landscape.

The technical substance of that training matters. Semiconductor fabrication is among the most demanding manufacturing disciplines in existence, requiring technicians to understand vacuum systems, plasma processes, lithographic patterning, thin-film deposition, metrology, and contamination control at scales measured in nanometers. A single fabrication facility may house hundreds of individual process tools, each with its own maintenance requirements, calibration procedures, and failure modes. Technicians who can install, maintain, diagnose, and repair such equipment are essential to fab uptime, and fab uptime translates directly into yield and output. Programs like this one aim to produce exactly that class of worker: not necessarily the process engineers who design fabrication recipes, but the skilled hands and trained eyes who keep the tools running to specification.

The destination for many of these graduates is Clay, New York, where Micron is constructing what the company describes as a megafab, a fabrication complex of enormous scale intended to anchor its expansion of domestic memory manufacturing. Memory chips, including the DRAM that Micron produces, are foundational components in everything from data centers and artificial intelligence infrastructure to vehicles and consumer electronics. Building a fabrication complex of that magnitude requires thousands of workers across construction, commissioning, and operations, and the demand for qualified technicians is projected to grow as the facility moves toward production. The apprenticeship program is explicitly designed to feed that pipeline, giving graduates the opportunity to explore technician roles at Micron’s fabrication facilities.

Recruitment for the program draws on Career and Technical Education pathways across New York State, engaging prospective students through direct recruitment and pre-apprenticeship programs. This approach reflects a broader shift in how the semiconductor industry approaches workforce development. Rather than relying solely on four-year engineering degrees, companies and their partners are building career-connected routes that begin in high school CTE programs and community colleges, pass through registered apprenticeships, and lead to well-paying technical careers. The model has proven effective in other advanced manufacturing sectors, and its application to semiconductors addresses a widely acknowledged gap between the industry’s growth projections and the available skilled labor pool.

The partnership structure behind the program is itself notable. NY Creates, the New York Center for Research, Economic Advancement, Technology, Engineering, and Science, serves as a lab-to-fab bridge for advanced electronics, operating facilities that host more than 2,700 industry experts and faculty and managing public and private investments totaling $25 billion. Micron brings industry expertise and a clear demand signal from its expansion plans. The Center for Economic Growth acts as the New York State Department of Labor sponsor. The Manufacturers Talent Institute, the talent development engine of MACNY, The Manufacturers Association, contributes workforce development experience. The Northeast Node of the National Network for Microelectronics Education, known as NNME Northeast, extends the program’s reach within a federally supported network dedicated to microelectronics education. Hudson Valley Community College supplies the academic coursework. Each partner occupies a distinct node in what organizers describe as a regional talent pipeline.

Leaders from the participating organizations framed the launch in expansive terms. Dave Anderson, President and CEO of NY Creates, welcomed the cohort as the newest members of a regional pipeline of skilled technicians developing expertise to produce new and innovative technologies, and described the collaboration as a reflection of Creates’ dedication to cultivating the next generation of highly skilled workers. Fran Dillard, Micron’s Vice President of Global Talent Acquisition and Workforce, said the signing ceremony marks the beginning of something bigger than a training program, calling it the start of new possibilities and noting that the apprentices are embarking on careers that will help shape the future of technology while expanding opportunities and building a stronger talent pipeline.

State officials likewise emphasized the economic and strategic stakes. Hope Knight, President, CEO and Commissioner of Empire State Development, described workforce development as a priority of Governor Hochul’s administration, aimed at ensuring New York has the talent to support high-growth industries building the economy of tomorrow, and offered best wishes to the ten apprentices. Roberta Reardon, Commissioner of the New York State Department of Labor, highlighted Registered Apprenticeships as a successful route for New Yorkers toward great-paying careers and thanked Micron and NY Creates for building the workforce pipeline the state needs in a high-skill, high-tech economy. Mark Eagan, President and CEO of the Center for Economic Growth, observed that semiconductor fabs do not run on technology alone but on talent, calling the first cohort proof that New York is investing in the people who will drive innovation inside its world-class facilities.

Michael Frame, Executive Director of the Manufacturers Talent Institute and Executive Vice President of MACNY, said apprenticeships connect individuals to the skills, experience, and opportunities needed to build meaningful careers while developing the talent industries need to grow, and characterized the inaugural cohort as an important milestone in building a people-powered talent pipeline for New York’s semiconductor industry. Taken together, the launch of this first cohort represents a concrete step in aligning education, industry, and state policy around a shared goal: ensuring that as New York and the nation expand domestic semiconductor manufacturing, the facilities being built today will be staffed tomorrow by workers trained in the state, at institutions embedded in the very research ecosystem where the underlying technologies are developed. For the ten apprentices who signed on this week, the sixteen-month program ahead is both a personal career pathway and a test case for a model that, if successful, is likely to be replicated as the American chip industry scales up.

Subject of Research: A joint NY Creates and Micron Technology registered apprenticeship program training semiconductor manufacturing technicians in New York State.

Article Title: The NY Creates and Micron Technology Joint Apprenticeship program welcomes first cohort

Article References: The NY Creates and Micron Technology Joint Apprenticeship program welcomes first cohort. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: semiconductor manufacturing, apprenticeship, workforce development, Micron Technology, NY Creates, Albany NanoTech Complex, chip fabrication, New York State, technician training, memory manufacturing, career and technical education, registered apprenticeship

The headline numbers frame the problem clearly. Overall, 71.95 percent of participants reported that HIV risk had been discussed during their training, and 64.42 percent said the same about PrEP. On the surface, those figures might seem encouraging, given that PrEP is a relatively recent addition to the prevention toolkit compared with decades of HIV education. But the study’s authors argue that the roughly one in three students who reported no PrEP discussion represents a missed opportunity at scale, because these are precisely the clinicians and pharmacists who will soon be prescribing, dispensing, and counseling patients about the medication that can reduce the risk of acquiring HIV through sex by about 99 percent when taken as directed.

The most eye-catching contrast in the data emerged between the two professional programs. After adjusting for other variables in multivariable ordinal regression models, pharmacy students had roughly twice the odds of medical students of reporting greater perceived HIV education, with an adjusted odds ratio of 2.03 and a 95 percent confidence interval of 1.35 to 3.04. The gap widened further for PrEP: pharmacy students had 3.41 times the odds of their medical counterparts of reporting greater perceived PrEP education, with a confidence interval of 2.23 to 5.22. That pharmacy trainees outpace medical trainees on PrEP awareness is notable, because physicians are often the ones expected to initiate PrEP prescriptions, while pharmacists increasingly serve as accessible touchpoints for medication counseling and, in many jurisdictions, direct pharmacy-based PrEP access.

The researchers also found that perceived education climbed steeply with academic seniority. Compared with first-year students, second-year students had nearly five times the odds of reporting greater perceived HIV education, with an adjusted odds ratio of 4.97, and more than five times the odds for PrEP education, at 5.42. Third-year students showed the strongest HIV signal in the entire analysis, with an adjusted odds ratio of 10.23, and fourth-year and beyond students reported the highest perceived PrEP education of all, with an adjusted odds ratio of 10.87. The trajectory makes intuitive sense: clinical content typically intensifies as students move from foundational coursework into rotations and experiential training. Yet the authors note that the pattern also implies first-year students, a group that includes many trainees who may already be interacting with peers and communities at risk, are largely entering professional school without meaningful PrEP literacy.

One of the more unexpected findings concerned gender. Cisgender women had lower odds than cisgender men of reporting greater perceived HIV education, with an adjusted odds ratio of 0.62, and lower odds of reporting greater perceived PrEP education, with an adjusted odds ratio of 0.51. In other words, even after accounting for program type and year of study, women in these cohorts consistently perceived less HIV and PrEP content in their training. The study did not test explanations for this disparity, but the finding raises questions about whether curricula, case materials, or classroom dynamics differ in ways that shape how students absorb and recall prevention content, and it flags a potential equity issue within the training environment itself.

Methodologically, the study relied on a cross-sectional survey design, which captures a snapshot of perceptions at a single point in time rather than tracking students longitudinally. The outcome measure was perceived education, meaning students’ own recollection and assessment of how much HIV and PrEP content they had encountered, not an objective audit of curriculum hours or a test of knowledge. Perception-based measures are valuable because they reflect what students feel prepared to act on, which influences whether future clinicians will raise prevention topics with patients. At the same time, the authors acknowledge that perception may not perfectly mirror actual curricular content, and the single-state sample of 385 students limits generalizability to other regions or professional programs.

The statistical approach deserves attention for readers who follow epidemiological methods. The team first used bivariate analyses to examine group differences in perceived education, then built multivariable ordinal regression models to estimate adjusted odds ratios with 95 percent confidence intervals. Ordinal regression is appropriate here because the perceived education outcome is ordered rather than binary, allowing the models to estimate how each predictor shifts a student’s position along a graded scale of reported educational exposure. The confidence intervals reported throughout the results exclude the null value of one, indicating that the associations between program type, academic year, gender, and perceived education were statistically reliable in this sample.

Why does this matter for public health? PrEP has been available in the United States since 2012, and federal initiatives have set ambitious targets for expanding its uptake, particularly among communities most likely to benefit, including gay and bisexual men, Black and Latino communities, people who inject drugs, and individuals in the American South and other high-burden regions. Yet uptake has lagged far behind eligibility, and a frequently cited barrier is that potential prescribers themselves feel unprepared to discuss or initiate PrEP. Studies like this one point to the upstream end of that pipeline: if a third of medical and pharmacy students report never discussing PrEP during training, the shortfall in confident prescribers and counselors is being manufactured years before those graduates see their first patients.

The pharmacy finding cuts both ways. On one hand, it suggests pharmacy curricula have integrated HIV prevention content relatively well, perhaps reflecting the profession’s central role in medication management and the growth of pharmacist-delivered preventive services. On the other hand, it highlights an asymmetry in which the professionals most likely to write initial PrEP prescriptions report less preparation than those most likely to fill and monitor them. Expanding pharmacy-based PrEP access, which several states now permit, could partially compensate, but the study’s authors argue that medical education also needs strengthening so that the two professions can function as a coordinated prevention workforce rather than an unevenly trained one.

The research team, led by Jacob Bleasdale and Emily Carter of the University of Central Florida, with colleagues at the University at Buffalo including Amy Hequembourg, Gene D. Morse, and Sarahmona Przybyla, framed their conclusions as an invitation to curriculum designers rather than an indictment of any single program. Their stated goal is to address the variability in educational experiences they documented and to better prepare future health professionals to care for the communities most likely to benefit from PrEP. The work was supported by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences of the National Institutes of Health, with additional support to the lead author from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. As PrEP formulations expand from daily oral tablets to longer-acting injectables, the educational demands on trainees will only grow, making the gaps identified here a moving target that curricula will need to chase deliberately rather than assume will close on its own.

Subject of Research: Perceived HIV and PrEP education among medical and pharmacy students

Article Title: Perceived HIV and PrEP education among medical and pharmacy students: a cross-sectional study

Article References: Bleasdale, J., Carter, E., Hequembourg, A., Morse, G. D., & Przybyla, S. (2026). Perceived HIV and PrEP education among medical and pharmacy students: a cross-sectional study. BMC Medical Education. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-026-10526-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12909-026-10526-x

Keywords: HIV prevention, PrEP, medical education, pharmacy students, medical students, cross-sectional study, health professions education, pre-exposure prophylaxis, curriculum, New York State, ordinal regression, health communication

The center builds long-term partnerships with schools, community organizations, and families with the explicit goal of improving learning outcomes for students from pre-kindergarten through 12th grade. Its approach is grounded in research, evaluation, technical assistance, and school-based implementation, and it works to create equitable pathways for student success and community well-being. In practice, that work ranges from providing school-based social-emotional support to helping families and students meet basic needs such as food and housing. The model reflects a growing consensus in education research that academic achievement cannot be separated from the conditions in which children live. By embedding university resources directly within schools and communities, the center seeks to address those conditions where they arise rather than treating them as problems for schools to solve alone.

Laura Bronstein, dean of the College of Community and Public Affairs and founding director of the newly renamed center, described the gift as a catalyst for the program’s continuing mission. “The center has become a leader in the university-assisted community schools (UACS) model, and this gift really allows us to continue and expand our mission,” Bronstein said. “We are grateful to the donors for their ongoing support for what we do and for believing in our mission to make education accessible and impactful for all.” Her comments underscore the dual role the center plays: it is both an operating program that places university students and staff in local schools and a scholarly enterprise that studies what works in community school implementation and shares those findings across the state and beyond.

The funding will allow the center to continue and build upon a set of existing initiatives that together form the backbone of its work. Among the most visible of these is the placement of hundreds of Binghamton University students as interns and volunteers in schools, where they provide tutoring, mentoring, and social-emotional support to students from early grades through high school. The center also provides technical support and training to community schools around New York State, extending its reach well beyond the districts immediately surrounding the university. In addition, it conducts interdisciplinary research to evaluate student outcomes, generating evidence about how the community schools model affects attendance, engagement, academic performance, and family well-being. The new gift is intended to sustain and deepen each of these strands of activity.

The donors behind the gift were the late Janet C. Watrous and Robert Kochersberger, a couple with longstanding ties to the university who had previously dedicated the Charlie K. Community Schools Room, named for their son. The naming of the center itself carries personal and institutional significance. The first half of the Couper-Owens name honors the Couper family, founding figures in Binghamton University’s history, while the second half pays tribute to Kochersberger’s late mother, Marjorie Mae Owens, a school nurse in rural Western New York who was known for bringing food and clothing to the homes of her students in need. That history of direct, practical care for children echoes the center’s own philosophy of meeting students and families where they are.

Kochersberger explained that the gift reflected both family history and a conviction about the program’s distinctive reach. “The new center gave me and my late wife the opportunity to support it in a more tangible way, something that we really wanted to do, because our son was a former elementary school teacher, my mother was an elementary school nurse,” he said. “And we’ve just felt really strongly about supporting this program because it is almost unique in the country for the outreach that it does into public schools.” His characterization of the program as nearly singular in its depth of public school outreach highlights what distinguishes a full university-assisted model from more limited school-university partnerships: the integration of university personnel, research capacity, and student volunteers into the daily operations of schools over sustained periods.

Binghamton University President Anne D’Alleva framed the center’s work as an embodiment of the university’s broader public mission, praising the program as a national and global leader in community schools. “Community engagement, just like celebrating our history and traditions, is a critically important part of what we do,” D’Alleva said. “And I often talk about the four pillars of our work as a great public university in education, research and scholarship, economic development, and community engagement. And this program touches on everything we do and need to do as a great public university. So I am so grateful for this support. I am so grateful that we are moving this program forward and that we will continue to have impact through it, not only and most importantly in our surrounding communities, but across the state, nationally, and globally.”

For Luann Kida, senior director of capacity building and implementation at the Couper-Owens Center for Community Schools, the durability of relationships with local school districts is the key to the model’s effectiveness. “This isn’t a program that is set up down the hall and forgotten about,” Kida said. “We’re reaching families and making a real impact. We strive to create meaningful partnerships with schools, supporting their important work while trying to break the intergenerational cycle that so many kids and families get caught up in. Community schools bring together schools, families, and community partners to address barriers, creating learning environments where children can thrive.” Her emphasis on breaking intergenerational cycles points to the long time horizons involved: community schools are designed not as short-term interventions but as permanent institutional fixtures that serve successive cohorts of children within the same neighborhoods.

The technical core of the university-assisted community schools model lies in its integration of services that are typically scattered across separate agencies. Expanding mental health services and making them available directly in schools is a key initiative of the UACS model at Whitney Point, one of the districts the center serves, where social work interns meet with students inside the high school rather than requiring families to navigate external clinics and waiting lists. That placement matters for outcomes: school-based services reduce transportation and scheduling obstacles, reach children who might otherwise go unserved, and allow social workers and counselors to coordinate with teachers who see students every day. Similar logic applies to the center’s work on basic needs, where connecting families to food and housing assistance removes obstacles that research consistently links to absenteeism and disengagement.

As the Couper-Owens Center for Community Schools moves forward under its new name, the $1 million gift positions it to extend a model that Binghamton University leaders describe as influential well beyond the Southern Tier of New York. The combination of sustained school partnerships, a pipeline of university student interns and volunteers, statewide technical assistance, and interdisciplinary evaluation research gives the center an unusually complete footprint within the community schools field. With the dedication ceremony at the University Downtown Center now behind it, the center’s task is to convert new philanthropic support into continued and expanded impact for students from pre-K through 12th grade, in the surrounding communities first and, as D’Alleva noted, across the state, nationally, and globally.

Subject of Research: University-assisted community schools and philanthropic support for expanding student services at Binghamton University

Article Title: Binghamton University community schools center gets new name, $1 million boost

Article References: Binghamton University community schools center gets new name, $1 million boost. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Binghamton University, community schools, university-assisted community schools, philanthropy, education, student outcomes, mental health services, school partnerships, New York State, College of Community and Public Affairs, social-emotional support, educational equity

The research team, led by Yineng Chen and Shao Lin of the University at Albany, State University of New York, drew on an unusually rich set of data sources to untangle the relationship between flooding, blackouts, and heart disease. Hospitalization records came from the Statewide Planning and Research Cooperative System, a comprehensive database covering patients across New York State from 2005 through 2021. Flood events were identified using the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Storm Events Database, while power outage information was supplied by the New York Department of Public Service. To account for other factors that could confound the association, the researchers incorporated fine particulate matter concentrations modeled with the Community Multiscale Air Quality system, meteorological variables from the New York State Mesonet and the Integrated Surface Database, and a suite of time-varying factors such as seasonality and long-term trends.

Methodologically, the study relied on distributed lag nonlinear models embedded within a quasi-Poisson regression framework, a statistical approach widely used in environmental epidemiology to capture how health risks change over time after an exposure and how those risks may behave nonlinearly with increasing hazard intensity. This design allowed the team to estimate the independent effect of flooding, the independent effect of power outages, and the joint effect of their co-occurrence, all while adjusting for air pollution, weather conditions, and temporal patterns that might otherwise masquerade as hazard effects. The researchers also examined hospital length of stay, treatment costs, comorbid conditions, and threshold levels of exposure, and they compared the periods before and during the COVID-19 pandemic to see whether the pandemic altered the hazard-health relationship.

The headline result is deceptively simple: co-occurrence matters. Flooding and power outages were each independently associated with hospitalizations for total cardiovascular disease and for specific cardiovascular subtypes, but the association was strongest when both hazards occurred together, with the highest relative risk reaching 1.09 (95 percent confidence interval: 1.03 to 1.15). In epidemiological terms, that corresponds to roughly a nine percent increase in cardiovascular hospitalization risk during compound events compared with periods without these hazards. While a nine percent increase may sound modest, cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in the United States, and even small proportional increases translate into substantial numbers of excess hospital admissions when large populations are exposed, as they are during major storms that knock out power across entire regions.

Equally important are the thresholds the study identified. Cardiovascular risk rose when flooding persisted for more than three days, and when power outages affected more than 15.3 percent of a community. These cutoffs provide concrete, actionable benchmarks for emergency managers: rather than treating all flood and outage events as equally threatening, preparedness efforts can be concentrated on events that cross these critical windows. The researchers also found that flood and outage events were associated with longer hospital stays and higher levels of comorbidity among admitted patients, suggesting that compound hazards not only push more people into hospitals but may also produce more complicated, resource-intensive admissions.

The burden was not distributed evenly across the population. Stratified analyses revealed stronger joint effects for several cardiovascular subtypes, including hypertension, stroke, and ischemic heart disease. The risks were also amplified among people over 65 years of age, individuals enrolled in Medicaid or lacking insurance coverage, and residents of rural communities. These patterns align with what is known about vulnerability to disasters: older adults are more likely to have preexisting cardiovascular conditions and to depend on electricity-powered medical devices, while rural communities often face longer emergency response times, older infrastructure, and fewer backup resources. Socioeconomically disadvantaged groups, meanwhile, may have less capacity to evacuate, stockpile medications, or weather prolonged outages safely, a disparity documented in prior research on disaster preparedness among older adults.

Season and timing mattered as well. The joint effects of flooding and outages were strongest during winter and spring, seasons when cold temperatures place additional strain on the cardiovascular system. Blood pressure is known to rise in colder conditions, and the physiological stress of a cold, dark, flooded home can compound that burden. Winter storms in the Northeast are also notorious for triggering both flooding and widespread outages simultaneously, meaning the compound-exposure scenario the study examines is not a rare curiosity but a recurring feature of the regional hazard landscape. River flood seasonality in the northeastern United States, concentrated in these colder months, helps explain why the overlap is so common.

The pandemic comparison added a further layer of complexity. The joint occurrence of flooding and power outages showed a larger risk of cardiovascular hospitalization during the COVID-19 period than before it, although the difference was not statistically significant. The authors note that the pandemic disrupted routine healthcare utilization, altered hospital admission patterns, and may have increased the underlying cardiovascular vulnerability of the population, since COVID-19 itself has been linked to cardiovascular complications. The direction of the finding, even without statistical significance, hints that health systems under strain may be less able to absorb the shocks of compound environmental hazards, a concern that resonates as climate change intensifies extreme weather while health systems face recurring pressures.

What makes this study particularly valuable is its shift in perspective. Most environmental health research examines one hazard at a time, estimating the risk of floods here and outages there, as if the world kindly separated its disasters. In reality, the same severe storm that inundates a neighborhood frequently severs its power lines, and the two hazards interact with human physiology and healthcare infrastructure in overlapping ways. Flooding can trigger acute psychological stress, physical exertion during evacuation and cleanup, exposure to cold water, and disruption of medication supplies. Power outages disable home medical devices such as oxygen concentrators and ventilators, knock out traffic signals and emergency services, and force vulnerable people into cold or unsafe conditions. When these mechanisms operate simultaneously, the physiological and logistical stresses multiply, and the new findings suggest the resulting hospitalization risk exceeds what either hazard alone would predict.

The authors argue that their results carry direct implications for emergency management. Identifying susceptible populations, including older adults, Medicaid beneficiaries, uninsured individuals, and rural residents, allows public health agencies to prioritize outreach, backup power for electricity-dependent patients, and early prescription refills before forecasted storms. Deploying preparedness efforts within the critical time windows the study identifies, such as the first days of prolonged flooding and outages crossing the 15.3 percent coverage threshold, could mitigate a meaningful share of the excess cardiovascular burden. As climate change drives more frequent and more intense extreme weather events, the compound-hazard framing may become not just an analytical refinement but a necessity for protecting the millions of people whose hearts bear the hidden costs of a warming, stormier world.

Subject of Research: The joint effects of co-occurring floods and power outages on cardiovascular disease hospitalizations in New York State

Article Title: A dangerous combination: how co-occurring floods and blackouts increase cardiovascular hospitalizations

Article References: Chen, Y., Tangang, R., Sun, Y., Zaloom, S., Guo, L., Song, S., Noor, M. I., Friedman, S., Wang, J., Bassill, N. P., Wang, T.-S., & Lin, S. (2026). A dangerous combination: how co-occurring floods and blackouts increase cardiovascular hospitalizations. Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41370-026-00977-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41370-026-00977-1

Keywords: flooding, power outages, cardiovascular disease, hospitalizations, extreme weather, compound hazards, environmental epidemiology, New York State, hypertension, stroke, ischemic heart disease, vulnerable populations

The grant was first secured in 2023 by Andrea Dávalos, associate professor of biological sciences at SUNY Cortland, and Li Jin, professor of geology, with Mary Beth Voltura, associate professor of biological sciences, joining them to help develop the project. What began as a component of the Coregonine Restoration Framework, a binational plan representing eight U.S. states, three U.S. intertribal organizations and the Canadian province of Ontario to restore and conserve the coregonine subfamily of freshwater fish, has since expanded into wider opportunities for students, while keeping its focus firmly on aquatic life and the ecosystems that sustain it.

This year, the Cortland portion of the grant totaled 73,315 dollars, enough to support five Cortland students and two Oswego students in research placements across the state. Although the budget is modest by the standards of large research programs, the faculty behind the initiative argue that its impact is disproportionate to its size. Jin emphasized that the paid structure of the internships matters as much as the science itself, because it allows students to pursue valuable professional opportunities without the burden of financial stress that often forces undergraduates to choose between earning money and gaining research experience.

The internships are designed to immerse students in the full workflow of professional fisheries science. According to Dávalos, participants engage in original research, hone their communication skills and learn a variety of field and laboratory techniques used in fisheries work. Just as importantly, they interact daily with professionals, graduate students and professors, building the kind of networks that frequently shape career trajectories long before graduation. She described networking as one of the great aspects of the internship, noting that these relationships expose undergraduates to career paths they might never otherwise encounter.

Among this year’s participants, the placements spanned some of New York’s most important aquatic research institutions. Jonathan Hall worked at the Cornell Biological Field Station at Shackelton Point, Isabella Impellizzeri was based at SUNY Oswego, Minju Kim conducted her research at the New York State Water Resources Institute at Cornell University, Vinoj Ramachandran worked with the Department of Environmental Conservation in Cortland, and Ava Schiff was placed at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry’s Thousand Islands Biological Station. Each site offered a distinct window into the practice of fisheries and water-resources science.

Kim, a senior chemistry major with a minor in geographic information systems, spent her summer studying the effects of dam removal, a topic of growing importance as managers weigh the ecological benefits of restoring free-flowing rivers against the practical realities of aging infrastructure. Her work combined fieldwork, laboratory analysis and data processing, including bioindicator sampling, a technique that uses living organisms to assess environmental conditions over time. She said that participating in an active field research project provided invaluable insight into professional workflows and project execution, giving her a realistic picture of how environmental science is conducted outside the classroom.

The experience has already shaped Kim’s plans for life after graduation. She intends to pursue a career in environmental chemistry that applies environmental monitoring and sustainable ecosystem management, with a particular focus on water quality. Reflecting on the summer, she noted that the internship provided practical, professional skills in fieldwork and laboratory analysis that go beyond standard classroom theory, a distinction that many undergraduates only encounter for the first time in graduate school or their first job.

For Impellizzeri, a senior conservation biology major, the eight weeks at SUNY Oswego delivered a different but equally valuable set of skills centered on boat-based fieldwork. Her research contributed to weekly tows for larval fish at four sites, with the collected samples subsequently tested and identified in the laboratory. Along the way she completed New York boater safety training and drove a boat for the first time, and learned how to manage sample collection and water profile measurements on the water. She described the hands-on experience as invaluable, particularly the multitude of skills she acquired regarding boat procedures and safety.

The internship has also helped Impellizzeri clarify her next steps. Still weighing her career options after graduation, she said that working near the water proved highly interesting, and that she is now considering a job at one of the Great Lakes, whether conservation based or nature based in general. Her trajectory illustrates one of the central aims of the program: to give undergraduates enough direct exposure to fisheries science that they can make informed decisions about graduate study and employment in the field.

Faculty involved in the program say the combination of paid positions, covered housing costs and credit-earning placements has been central to its success, removing financial barriers while ensuring the experience carries formal academic weight. Applications for the Summer 2027 internships, the final year currently funded under the USGS grant, will open in the spring semester. As the Coregonine Restoration Framework continues its multi-state, multi-national effort to conserve a vulnerable subfamily of freshwater fish, the program’s graduates carry with them the field techniques, laboratory skills and professional connections that the next generation of fisheries scientists will need.

Subject of Research: Paid undergraduate fisheries research internships in New York funded by a USGS grant tied to the Coregonine Restoration Framework

Article Title: Students land research internships at fisheries across New York

Article References: Students land research internships at fisheries across New York. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: USGS grant, SUNY Cortland, SUNY Oswego, fisheries internships, undergraduate research, Coregonine Restoration Framework, dam removal, larval fish, water quality, New York State, aquatic science, fieldwork