The Digital Transformation Summer Corps is a paid, 10-week program that invites students with skills in software development and data science to work alongside faculty to accelerate digitally-enabled research projects at WashU.
Students in the program gain hands-on experience working on high-impact initiatives, while faculty benefit from dedicated technical expertise to advance their work. Through mentorship, collaboration, and rigorous training in best practices for AI, machine learning, and computational research, the program fosters a dynamic community of innovation.
Aligned with WashU’s Here & Next strategic plan, the Digital Transformation Summer Corps strengthens the university’s digital infrastructure, supports faculty research, and delivers tangible outcomes that drive future funding and scholarly advancement.
Program Objectives
Building an intellectual community
The program will strengthen and connect the siloed communities of developers that exist across schools and departments to attract faculty and drive interdisciplinary innovation.
Accelerating research projects
Dedicated student workers will advance research projects that align with Here and Next objectives and help strengthen WashU’s compute infrastructure by creating user-friendly code components that enable researchers to leverage campus compute resources more efficiently.
Submitting 5-7 projects for external funding
Professional grant writers will provide application support to help faculty successfully apply for external funding in the fall.
Program Timeline
| May 27 – 30 | Orientation week Students meet with assigned faculty mentors, PIs and DI2 staff to define clear expectations. |
| June 2 – Jul 25 | Research and software development Students begin coding work on projects, under faculty mentorship, with weekly project meetings, code reviews, and a mid-program review the week of June 30. |
| July 28 – August 1 | Final deliverables and wrap-up Teams showcase final work and prepare for next steps. |
| Fall 2025 | Funding applications Faculty PIs collaborate with campus partners to identify and apply for funding opportunities to further scale projects. |
2025 Projects
Together, faculty PIs and selected students will collaborate on eight interdisciplinary projects spanning eight WashU schools and departments, including Arts & Sciences, McKelvey, Public Health, Brown, Medicine, Law, the Center for the Environment, and Information Technology.
Schools: Arts & Sciences, Brown
Overview: The St. Louis Dashboard is an interactive data visualization platform developed in collaboration with the DSS to help researchers, policymakers, and the public explore key issues impacting the St. Louis region. It presents accessible, well-designed charts and graphs related to topics such as housing, public health, and climate resilience.
Goals: Incorporate more data sets into the dashboard and establish a data pipeline to ensure the information is current and enhance the tool’s effectiveness.
Faculty PIs: Andrew Reeves, Jason Jabbari
Students: Summer Xia, Ryan O’Connor
Collaborator: Information Technology
Overview: The Research Infrastructure Services (RIS) are WashU’s array of centrally managed high-performance computing clusters and storage services. These highly valuable resources are often inaccessible to faculty and students without advanced programming knowledge.
Goals: Improve accessibility and efficiency of RIS to accelerate digital research. Possible initiatives include developing a support chatbot, creating a centralized library of reusable code snippets, and revamping the user experience to make utilizing the service easier.
Project leads: Shin Leong, Daryl Spencer, Elyn Fritz-Waters, Craig Pohl
Students: Daedalus Chen, Cindy Zhang, Christine Jiang, Andy Hoette
School: Medicine
Overview: The People’s Voice Survey developed by the QuEST Network, is a global initiative that captures data on individuals’ experiences, trust, and expectations regarding healthcare systems, aiming to inform policy and promote accountability.
Goals: Develop a user-friendly data visualization and a mobile application, enhancing the accessibility and impact of the collected data. These tools are slated for presentation at the upcoming Science for Health Systems conference hosted by WashU.
Faculty PIs: Chuck Goss, Margaret Kruk, Todd P. Lewis, Laura Espinoza-Pajuelo
Students: Julie Baguio, John Li
Schools: Arts & Sciences, McKelvey
Overview: The Mobility Project focuses on analyzing and visualizing mobility patterns using anonymized GPS and Wi-Fi data.
Goals: Process OpenStreetMap and campus GPS data to predict movement patterns, build interactive visualization tools, and explore integration with Cisco Spaces. The goal is to create a system that tracks and analyzes individual and aggregate mobility trends while maintaining data privacy.
Faculty PIs: Joshua Jackson, William Yeoh
Students: Jonathan Lin, Richie Jiang, Justin Park
School: Arts & Sciences
Overview: This project explores the emerging opportunities that exist at the intersection of artificial intelligence and mental health.
Goal: Develop a model to assess and identify mental health indicators from video recordings to contribute to a deeper understanding of mental health conditions and enable better support and intervention strategies.
Faculty PI: Joshua Oltmanns
Students: Mehrnoosh Rahbardar, Axel Ramirez
Schools: Law, McKelvey
Overview: This exploratory project investigates how emerging artificial intelligence technologies intersect with legal frameworks, ethical accountability, and public understanding of digital privacy.
Faculty PIs: Umar Iqbal, Ryan Durrie
Students: Yehu Chen, Liam Henson
Schools & Departments: Public Health, McKelvey, Center for the Environment
Overview: This project explores the use of vision-language models (VLMs) to assess urban livability and built environments through ground-level imagery such as Google Street View.
Goal: Automate a traditionally manual and resource-intensive process—sending individuals into neighborhoods to evaluate infrastructure, safety, and accessibility indicators.
Faculty PIs: Rodrigo Reis, Nathan Jacobs, Tammy English
Students: Dev Gupta, Sophia Raudez, Ahmad Hamzeh
School: Arts & Sciences
Overview: Missouri residents can register, correct, or order a vital record through the state’s Health and Senior Services website, but the process is often cumbersome and difficult.
Goal: Develop a chatbot using the WashU Chatbot Creator that guides users through the process and automatically generates the completed form, enhancing accessibility for Missouri residents.
Faculty PI: Ted Enamorado
2025 Faculty Mentors
Joe Guinness, PhD
Associate Professor of Statistics & Data Science
Co-Director of Undergraduate Studies in SDS
Updates
Eight interdisciplinary teams, ten weeks: Meet the Digital Transformation Summer Corps projects
Introducing the Digital Transformation Summer Corps
Digital Transformation Summer Corps Partners
Digital Solutions Studios (DSS)
Students will work to further develop and refine research prototypes created in collaboration with the DSS.
Skandalaris Center
The Skandalaris Center will facilitate experiential learning events with local industry partners.
WashU Information Technology
The Summer Corps will work to develop user-friendly code components that make working with WashU IT’s RIS interface more approachable for faculty researchers.
CSE Research Experience for Undergrads
The Summer Corps will work with CSE REU to identify skilled students for the 2025 cohort and opportunities to create connections across disciplines.
Let’s collaborate!
Want to learn more or get involved? Reach out to us and we’ll be in touch.