I definitely didn’t set out to have three high school and two undergrad students this summer.

But they’re fantastic, and making real contributions to our scientific work! Anna and Apurva (left and right) have written a new C++ front-end to the essential Smith-Waterman pre-alignment step for Duncan’s partis software. Andrew and Lola (center) are investigating the traces of maximum-likelihood phylogenetic inference software packages. Thayer (back left) is writing a multi-threaded C++ program to systematically search for all of the trees above a given likelihood cutoff. All of them are learning about science and coding.

These students rock, and I can’t wait to see what great things they bring into the world with their talent.