Hello, my name is Nigel Pugh and I am from Ahoskie, North Carolina. I am a sophomore attending Elizabeth City State University located in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. My major is Computer Science with a scientific concentration, and a minor in Mathematics. My interest in the Computer Science field began when a family friend invited me to his place of work. From that point forward, I was deeply intrigued by the profession. My plan is to pursue a bachelor’s degree and continue my education by going to graduate school to obtain a master’s degree. My ultimate goal is to acquire a Computer Science degree and utilize the skills I have obtained and apply them to the vast Computer Science arena.

During the summer of 2013, I got the chance to take part in a five-week summer program called Vikings Enhancing Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (VESTEM). During this program, was offered the opportunity to conduct research. The research I chose was: “The Biosynthesis of Ethanol” under my mentor Mrs. Shanta Outlaw. Ethanol is a renewable source that is found in plenty of our everyday products, and is used as an alternative burning to gasoline. My group formulated three different mixtures of different sucrose and forms of yeast to see which mixture produced the most amount of pure ethanol.

I was accepted into an undergraduate research program entitled Center of Excellence in Remote Sensing Education and Research (CERSER) under the leadership of Dr. Linda B. Hayden. In the CERSER program, I have had the opportunity to learn valuable skills that will assist me with my career.

In the spring of 2014, as a part of the CERSER program, I conducted research entitled “Configuring and Customizing the HUBzero Experience” under the guidance of Mr. Justin Deloatch and Mr. Je’aime Powell. HUBzero is an open source software package used to construct websites for scientific research and educational activities. Researchers at Purdue University in conjunction with the National Science Foundation (NSF) originally created HUBzero. The team’s project consisted of creating, configuring, and customizing our own hub. The CERSERhub was known as our hub. The team also investigated how HUBzero features are utilized for research, education, and scientific collaboration. From the data that was collected from the 2013 Pasquotank River Watershed research project, a database was created and added as a component of our hub.

In the summer of 2014, I took part in the Indiana University Summer Research Opportunities in Computing (IU-SROC), which is an eight-week research program in the School of Informatics that is designed to attract high potential minority students into graduate school fields such as computer science, and informatics. My research project was entitled: “Evaluating the Performance of MPI Java in FutureGrid” under the mentorship of Saliya Enkanyake. Message Passage Interface (MPI) has been the common choice among developers when developing tightly coupled parallel High Performance Computing (HPC) applications and the majority of such applications are based on C, C++ or FORTRAN. I was responsible for converting the Ohio State Micro Benchmark broadcast from MPI C to MPI Java and comparing the performance results to the standard MPI C benchmark.

During the spring 2015 academic year, as part of the CERSER program, I conducted research entitled “ Documentation of Site Preparation for the Installation of SeaSpace Ground Stations at ECSU” under the mentorship of Michael Osterhouse and Andrew Brumfield. In September 2014, a transition was made to a direct purchase and installation of Seaspace hardware and software. The installation of the Seaspace hardware included: 15 Visualization stations, 2 monitoring systems, a Teravault raw storage device, and a TeraScan Rapid Environmental X-treme (TREX) high-powered processor. The purpose of this project was to document the installation requirements and internal processes at ECSU for Seaspace Hardware and Software Equipment, with also addressing; the location of engineering findings, location of installation requirements, repositioning and securing current ground stations, and proper training center needs.

For the future, after obtaining my bachelor's degree, I plan on furthering my education and pursuing a master's degree. Upon completion of master's degree, I plan on entering the computer science field to work for a large corporation utilizing the skills and knowledge I have obtained.