Student Programs

Organization: Center for Health and the Global Environment (CHanGE)

Available Internship Positions: 2

Hours: 25 hours per week (20 hours per week with CHanGE and 5 hours per week with the EarthLab cohort)

Total Summer Stipend: $4,950 disbursed over the 9 week internship, plus $180 total travel stipend per intern

Location: Hybrid, including a required in-person EarthLab cohort meeting each Tuesday from 9 am – 1 pm

Summary: CHanGE’s decision support platform, CHaRT (Climate and Health Risk Tool), combines a vulnerability and risk mapping tool with location-specific guidance for reducing health risks from climate change. Interns will work closely with the team of climate and health practitioners and computer scientists that maintain CHaRT and will focus on several aspects of CHaRT’s development, continuous quality improvement, and dissemination, including engagement with users, modification of existing content, development of new content based on user feedback, and development of user supports.

Activities include meeting CHaRT users to discuss their use experience and feedback about the tool; reviewing of public health literature to refine guidance on reducing public health risks from extreme heat or other climate-sensitive environmental hazards; drafting and editing  guidance to post in the CHaRT tool; developing new workflows in collaboration with a web programmer; and meeting with new stakeholders to discuss the tool, field questions on its use, and guide users as needed. 

Requires strong written and verbal communication skills, flexibility and creativity, openness to learn about climate and health, ability to work both independently and with a team, and motivation to pursue a diverse collection of projects and activities. Experience with information science, user interface and user experience will be helpful.

Organization: Climate Impacts Group (CIG)

Available Internship Positions: 1

Hours: 40 hours per week (35 hours per week with CIG and 5 hours per week with the EarthLab cohort)

Total Summer Stipend: $7,920 disbursed over the 9 week internship, plus $180 total travel stipend per intern

Location: Hybrid, including a required in-person EarthLab cohort meeting each Tuesday from 9 am – 1 pm

Summary: The Climate Impacts Group (CIG) is looking for an Intern that will be testing out an approach to estimating how often flood warning levels occur, now and in the future. 

Activities will include combining existing measurements from streamflow gauges with future streamflow modeling to estimate changes in the frequency of flood warning levels currently, and in the future, performing exploratory calculations and helping to explore and define the work needed to expand the calculations to the entire Pacific Northwest region. We will also explore options for communicating the findings, possibly meeting with practitioners who could provide insight into the best audience and approach for disseminating the results. 

The position is a good fit for someone who likes playing with numbers but also wants a real-world application with clear societal benefits, and has experience analyzing data using technical computing software (python, R, matlab, etc.). The intern in this position will also have opportunities to develop innovative visualizations if that is of interest.

Organization: Climate Impacts Group (CIG)

Available Internship Positions: 1

Hours: 40 hours per week (35 hours per week with CIG and 5 hours per week with the EarthLab cohort)

Total Summer Stipend: $7,920 disbursed over the 9 week internship, plus $180 total travel stipend per intern

Location: Hybrid, including a required in-person EarthLab cohort meeting each Tuesday from 9 am – 1 pm

Summary: The Climate Impacts Group (CIG) is currently partnering with Oregon Rural Action, a non-profit in eastern Oregon focusing on social justice, agricultural and economic sustainability, and the stewardship of the region’s land, air, and water. One of their current focus areas is the high levels of nitrate in the groundwater in Umatilla and Morrow counties. These levels exceed safe drinking water standards and have been rising since they were first detected more than 30 years ago. The EPA has recently engaged with the state of Oregon, and is requiring the state to address the public health consequences of excess nitrate in groundwater, under Section 1431 of the Safe Drinking Water Act. The EPA is also engaged with the same issue in Washington and Minnesota. The intern in this position will support ORA by comparing and contrasting both the conditions in each state and the specifics of EPA’s response. By developing a more comprehensive understanding of the issue, ORA can better understand the opportunities for addressing this critical issue that is emerging in rural agricultural states.

Activities include researching EPA approaches in all three states, identifying creative ways to synthesize and share that information, discussing and brainstorming with project supervisor and ORA, and participating in research team meetings alongside CIG, ORA, and collaborators.

This position is best suited for a candidate that is interested in environmental policy and the realities of policy implementation. A background in these topics is beneficial, but is not absolutely necessary — just an enthusiasm for learning about them and an ability to advance research and writing with a fair degree of autonomy. Strong writing and communication skills are also a plus.

Organization: The Northwest Climate Resilience Collaborative at the Climate Impacts Group (CIG)

Available Internship Positions: 1

Hours: 35 hours per week (30 hours per week with CIG and 5 hours per week with the EarthLab cohort)

Total Summer Stipend: $6,930 disbursed over the 9 week internship, plus $180 total travel stipend per intern

Location: Hybrid with possible 2-week in-person required with CIG (exact dates to be determined) and a required in-person EarthLab cohort meeting each Tuesday from 9 am – 1 pm

Summary: The Climate Impacts Group is piloting the first year of a climate justice summer academy. The intern in this position will help with coordination of the summer school ahead of time, logistics and support during the summer school, supporting with facilitation where appropriate, and creating curriculum and resources to share in the aftermath. There will also be an opportunity to support the creation of an evaluation plan to inform future summer academies. 

Activities will include logistical support, coordination, note-taking, research support (literature reviews or synthesis), facilitation of summer school , potential site visits, curriculum development, evaluation work on the summer school and more.

This position is best suited for a candidate that possesses a deep interest in climate justice, and has an interdisciplinary environmental education.

Organization: The Northwest Climate Resilience Collaborative at the Climate Impacts Group (CIG)

Available Internship Positions: 1

Hours: 35 hours per week (30 hours per week with CIG and 5 hours per week with the EarthLab cohort)

Total Summer Stipend: $6,930 disbursed over the 9 week internship, plus $180 total travel stipend per intern

Location: Hybrid, including a required in-person EarthLab cohort meeting each Tuesday from 9 am – 1 pm 

Summary: The Climate Impacts Group is working to incorporate community knowledge and stories into climate adaptation efforts through climate storytelling work. The intern in this position will be able to learn project management skills, organizational skills, research support, as well as learn about the production process for documentary film, and about oral histories.

Activities may include working with a documentary film collective to do research that informs our filmmaking, logistical support to support film shoots or our community convening with tribal communities, or research assistance with oral histories that are collected.

This position is best suited for a candidate that possesses an interest in media, outreach, storytelling, and community-led research. Some background in social science methods could be useful as well.

Organization: Nature and Health (N&H)

Available Internship Positions: 2

Hours: 25 hours per week (20 hours per week with Nature and Health and 5 hours per week with the EarthLab cohort)

Total Summer Stipend: $4,950 disbursed over the 9 week internship, plus $180 total travel stipend per intern

Location: Hybrid, including a required in-person EarthLab cohort meeting each Tuesday from 9 am – 1 pm

Summary: Nature and Health is a collaboration of nearly 400 researchers, healthcare practitioners, policymakers, urban planners, and community members who are passionate about understanding how time spent in nature can improve human health and well-being. Our findings help shape programs, policies, and spaces that improve health for all people and protect nature. Over the coming year, one of our major goals is to calculate the healthcare cost savings associated with spending time in nature. In other words, how much money can we save by prescribing time in nature and by increasing access to nature? We need to answer these questions before we can influence policy at a meaningful and systemic scale. Intern(s) will create a comprehensive literature review related to healthcare cost savings based on time spent in nature. This literature review will serve as the foundation for a Healthcare Economist to derive healthcare cost savings predictions for different health conditions and exposure to nature scenarios.

Activities will include determining inclusion/exclusion criteria, conducting searches in published literature, saving search results in a citation management tool, de-duplicating search results, evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of individual sources and evaluating them for bias, methodologies, and thoroughness, grouping results to an organizational structure that helps answer our research questions, highlighting any gaps that may exist in research to date, analyzing the information gathered, and synthesizing bodies of research into easily readable summaries

Requires strong communication, organizational, and research skills.

Organization: Puget Sound Institute & School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences

Available Internship Positions: 1

Hours: 40 hours per week (35 hours per week with PSI and SAFS and 5 hours per week with the EarthLab cohort)

Total Summer Stipend: $7,920 disbursed over the 9 week internship, plus $180 total travel stipend per intern

Location: In-person at SAFS with possible remote accommodations and a required in-person EarthLab cohort meeting each Tuesday from 9 am – 1 pm

Summary: Climate change is warming waters in Puget Sound. Warmer waters both increase how much oxygen marine life needs, while simultaneously reducing how much oxygen the water can hold. These changes may have lethal and chronic impacts on marine life, including shifting available habitats. These climate-driven impacts and migration have implications for how we manage both fisheries and water quality to protect ecologically and culturally relevant species. The intern in this position will work closely with a team of fisheries ecologists, modelers, and policy analysts to strengthen our scientific understanding and better inform management decisions, will lead a meta-analysis of species’ oxygen sensitivity, focusing on species in Puget Sound that are either ecologically or culturally important or thought to be particularly sensitive to low dissolved oxygen, in collaboration with Puget Sound Institute, will analyze the exposure and vulnerability of Puget Sound species to low dissolved oxygen, and explore how that exposure may change with reductions in nutrient loadings from human activities.

Activities will include leading  literature reviews to gather published estimates on critical oxygen pressures for key Puget Sound species and Collaborate with UW Puget Sound Institute to compare the literature thresholds to model predictions of low dissolved oxygen and identify key knowledge gaps.

This position is best suited for a candidate that possesses class experience with scientific literature reviews and strong communication skills. Familiarity with one or more of the following bodies of literature is a plus: marine biology, ecosystem science, or environmental studies. An interest in applied science is a benefit.

Organization: Puget Sound Institute

Available Internship Positions: 1

Hours: 25 hours per week (20 hours per week with Puget Sound Institute and 5 hours per week with EarthLab cohort)

Total Summer Stipend: $4,950 disbursed over the 9 week internship, plus $180 total travel stipend per intern

Location: Hybrid, including a required in-person EarthLab cohort meeting each Tuesday from 9 am – 1 pm

Summary: Washington state is where collaborative governance on natural resources began, in the mid-1970s. As the new field grew, it helped to resolve a key civil rights struggle over tribal fishing rights. Since then, collaborative approaches in Washington have led to many groundbreaking outcomes, greatly influencing the rest of the nation and a burgeoning field over a 50-year history. The Collaborative Leadership Project (hosted by the Puget Sound Institute at the UW’s Center for Urban Waters, and sponsored by more than 20 federal, tribal, state, and local governments; and academic, public, and private individuals, organizations, and foundations) is intended to preserve and promote collaborative natural resource policy making in Washington by: 1) Capturing/archiving this history through oral history interviews archived at UW Libraries; 2) Distilling those interviews into documentary film; and 3) Building on that work to foster and support collaborative leadership for today’s and the next generation of leaders. The intern in this position will work with the Project Lead as the project begins to apply the knowledge base created via the oral histories and documentary toward the third task of applying collaborative principles and approaches to today’s challenges, such as Puget Sound restoration, climate change, and social/environmental justice

Activities can be refined based on the intern’s interest, but may include collaborating to develop collaborative governance teaching and training curricula, conducting  additional research to augment the oral history archive and/or refine the archive to make it more useful to end-users including researchers and the general public, exploring how collaborative governance has been used to address policy challenges over the past 50 years and consider how collaborative leadership will be needed to addressing the challenges we face today, and will face in the future, and potentially designing and hosting conversations (perhaps filmed) with the rest of the internship cohort on this topic.

This position is best suited for a candidate that possesses either a scientific and/or policy background. An ideal candidate  will be curious, collaborative, and an effective communicator.

Organization: Puget Sound Institute

Available Internship Positions: 1

Hours: 20 hours/week (15 hours at PSI  + 5 hours at EarthLab with intern cohort)

Total Summer Stipend: $3,960 disbursed over the 9 week internship, plus $180 total travel stipend per intern

Location: Hybrid, including a required in-person EarthLab cohort meeting each Tuesday from 9 am – 1 pm

Summary: The intern in this position will compile a thoroughly researched and referenced literature review and list of key facts or short summaries focusing on how sea level rise is affecting estuarine habitats in Puget Sound. The information will address both the impacts to the ecosystem (e.g. loss of habitat) and the impacts to disadvantaged or disenfranchised communities in the context of environmental justice. This information will be used as part of a special report for policymakers as well as in social media posts and topical articles for the Encyclopedia of Puget Sound (eopugetsound.org). The intern will also compile contact information for target audiences that will assist with distribution of communications materials.

Activities will include conducting independent research within specified guidelines — such as perusal of academic journals, agency reports, and other sources, synthesizing writing, procurement of materials such as photographs and reports, and digitizing of documents. If the intern has skills as a journalist, there is an opportunity to report and write a short magazine-style article (approximately 400 words) for publication on the Encyclopedia of Puget Sound.

The internship is best suited for a candidate with strong research and writing skills and a knowledge of environmental studies or the sciences. Experience in science communication is a plus, but enthusiasm and interest can go a long way. Having your own vehicle would be beneficial, but not required.

Organization: The Nature Conservancy in Washington (TNC)

Available Internship Positions: 2

Hours: 35 hours/week (30 hours at TNC + 5 hours at EarthLab with intern cohort)

Total Summer Stipend: $6,930 disbursed over the 9 week internship, plus $180 total travel stipend per intern

Location: Hybrid + Opportunity for In-Person Fieldwork, including a required in-person EarthLab cohort meeting each Tuesday from 9 am – 1 pm

Summary: The Nature Conservancy (TNC) is looking for two UW undergraduate students to work with a team of scientists whose research informs the conservation, management, and restoration work of The Nature Conservancy in Washington State. These internships will involve opportunities for fieldwork with conservation practitioners as well as office and remote work, including data collection, data management and entry, and reporting/visualizing research findings. Projects on which the interns may work include but are not limited to: studying tree regeneration in an old growth forest restoration project at TNC’s Ellsworth Creek Preserve, fieldwork and data analysis to understand the impacts of marsh restoration on vegetation communities, quantifying and sharing research on urban tree benefits to air quality in the Puget Sound region, processing photos and deploying wildlife cameras in Central WA forests, and literature review/data synthesis for elements of TNC’s emerging strategic plan, including the interplay between salmon and ecological fire and peatlands as natural climate solutions.

At least one of the internships will focus part of their time on quantifying the impacts of marsh restoration at Port Susan Bay Preserve as part of a team of conservation practitioners and scientists. This will require 10-15 longer fieldwork days spread across the summer specifically at Port Susan Bay Preserve, monitoring marsh vegetation under sometimes challenging outdoor conditions. While both interns will have opportunities to support fieldwork throughout the internship, applicants should indicate if this opportunity for field-based marsh research is of interest to them.

Potential activities will include identifying, quantifying, and analyzing data, literature reviews and synthesis/meta-analysis of existing data and research, geospatial analysis and/or preparation of map products to share geospatial data, deployment and analysis of wildlife camera traps to monitor wildlife near Cle Elum, WA, and fieldwork which may include activities such as marsh vegetation monitoring and urban field research in Tacoma. Fieldwork days will require early morning travel to field sites. Other science, conservation, communication or policy projects may arise throughout the summer.

These positions are best suited for candidates with some experience and understanding of the PNW natural systems, have strong time-management and organizational skills, and are excited by the prospect of many different types of work experiences. Strong preference for students majoring in an environmental or biological science, preferably, with prior coursework in introductory ecology. Driver’s license and ability to travel in Washington state (transportation options may be available) are required.

Organization: EarthLab, Communications & Engagement team

Internship Title: Storytelling for Social Change Intern

Available Internship Positions: 1

Hours: 25 hours per week (20 hours per week with the EarthLab Communications Lead and 5 hours per week with the EarthLab cohort)

Total Summer Stipend: $4,950 disbursed over the 9 week internship, plus $180 total travel stipend per intern

Location: Hybrid with a preference for in-person on Tuesdays/Thursdays and a required in-person EarthLab cohort meeting each Tuesday from 9 am – 1 pm

Summary: Intern will assist social media strategy and engagement for EarthLab channels (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube) including contributing to a flexible content calendar, drafting and scheduling posts, creating visuals such as graphics or short videos, and amplifying EarthLab partners’ social media content. The intern will help brainstorm and develop additional creative opportunities with the support of the supervisor to showcase the EarthLab story in action. This can be done through various forms of storytelling deliverables, be it social media marketing campaigns, blogs, event planning, visual and/or motion design, etc. As part of this work, the intern will be assisting the Communications team build out a digital EarthLab story bank, showcasing how the innovative EarthLab organizational model bridges the UW, member organizations, students & communities. Due to the creative nature of this internship, there is flexibility to support the intern’s interests in what skills are further developed over the course of the summer. The intern will also assist in the media monitoring, organization, amplification and dissemination of new research findings that come from EarthLab member organizations in an interesting and accessible manner. This position is best suited for a candidate that possesses strong written and verbal skills, an attention to detail, a desire to collaborate on projects with a team, and a mindset to creatively problem solve.

Organization: Washington Ocean Acidification Center (WOAC)

Internship Title: Ocean Acidification Intern

Available Internship Positions: 1

Hours: 25 hours per week (20 hours per week with WOAC and 5 hours per week with the EarthLab cohort)

Total Summer Stipend: $4,950 disbursed over the 9 week internship, plus $180 total travel stipend per intern

Location: Hybrid + Required 5-day Research Cruise, and a required in-person EarthLab cohort meeting each Tuesday from 9 am – 1 pm 

Summary: The Washington Ocean Acidification Center (WOAC), has held seasonal cruises in April, July, and September since 2014, measuring water properties, plankton, and other relevant variables. The intern in this position will learn about the job of a research technician in an oceanography lab, and learn about what goes into an ocean acidification research cruise. The intern  will also learn post cruise lab analyses.

Activities will include prepping and packing for a research cruise, assisting with sampling procedures, and working on sample analysis and data processing. This position is best suited for a candidate that possesses an interest in lab work and oceanographic data, and willingness and ability to go to sea on a research vessel for 5 days in July (dates will be confirmed at a later time).

Organization: Washington Ocean Acidification Center (WOAC)

Internship Title: Ocean Literacy Intern

Available Internship Positions: 1

Hours: 15 hours/week (10 hours at WOAC + 5 hours at EarthLab with intern cohort)

Total Summer Stipend: $2,970 disbursed over the 9-week internship plus a one-time $!80 transportation stipend

Location: Hybrid, including a required in-person EarthLab cohort meeting each Tuesday from 9 am – 1 pm

Summary: This internship is focused on outreach and increasing ocean literacy. The Washington Ocean Acidification Center, WOAC, partners with NANOOS (Northwest Association of Networked Ocean Observing Systems, www.nanoos.org) to serve WOAC cruise and buoy data as well as data from our shellfish grower partners. NANOOS offers a range of educational curricula to foster ocean literacy and incorporate regional data in the classroom. The intern will develop a middle school-level lesson plan using networked ocean data available on the NANOOS Visualization System (NVS), including the WOAC data.

Activities will include deciding  on a topic based on individual academic interests then defining a research question to investigate through a lesson plan. The intern will become familiar with using the NANOOS Visualization System (NVS) to access available data and what constitutes a successful curriculum and a  lesson plan will be developed using a series of steps and examples to guide students through their investigation of the research question.

Enthusiasm and good communication skills are a plus.