From Montana labs to NASA: Yale Engineering students' summer research
Written by Natalie Haase '27
This summer, Yale Engineering undergraduates traded New Haven for research benches and hardware labs across the country — from a virology lab in the Montana mountains to a NASA space center in Maryland to a hardware validation team outside Boston. Colten Danelski '27 (Biomedical Engineering) investigated how the brain responds to viral infection at Rocky Mountain Laboratories, Iyanu Nafiu '27 (Electrical Engineering) helped automate hardware testing at Dell Technologies, and Louisa Kinsley '28 (Chemical Engineering) built chemical baselines for detecting life on distant ocean worlds at NASA Goddard. Read on for a look at their summers.
Colten Danelski '27 (Biomedical Engineering)
This summer, Colten Danelski '27, a senior from Duluth, MN, studying Biomedical Engineering, spent ten weeks as a research intern under Dr. Suryawanshi (NIH/NIAID) at Rocky Mountain Laboratories (RML) in Hamilton, MT, studying how influenza and herpes viruses affect the nervous system.
RML is one of NIAID's key intramural research sites, built for exactly this kind of work: understanding how pathogens interact with the body at a mechanistic level, from the immune system down to individual cell types. Danelski's summer centered on the brain's relationship to infection — how neural and vascular tissue respond to viruses that can reach, or threaten to reach, the central nervous system.
Danelski split his time across three projects. The first examined trained immune memory in brain endothelial cells. These cells, which form part of the blood-brain barrier, can theoretically "remember" a prior viral exposure and mount a faster or different response the next time. Danelski described his research, “I was infecting the cells with poly IC (viral mimic, induces antiviral response) via electroporation, alongside two control groups (untreated and electroporated (no viral mimic). I would then extract the RNA and run a qPCR to get baseline results. I’d let the cells sit for a week then I’d repeat the same process, giving me 9 different conditions which I’d compare relative fold change in inflammatory signals via qPCR.” These experiments are being continued with different cell types and virus strains.The second used drug delivery methods to inhibit aspects of the SIRT pathway, a set of proteins involved in cellular stress response, with the goal of limiting viral replication. He used different acetylase and deacetylase inhibitors to target different enzymes of the SIRT pathway. He conducted the preliminary dose calculations and dilutions + cytotoxicity and plaque assays of these drugs but did not get to see the project through due to the time constraint of my internship. The third was a literature review, now being developed into a manuscript, on how the brain and body communicate about viral infection and inflammation via the vagus nerve.
Across all three projects, Danelski found himself troubleshooting protocols as much as running them. Learning to adjust details and methods varying by the slightest parameters helped him get clean, repeatable data that future experiments in the lab could build on. He also gained experience presenting his findings, both to his immediate lab group and to the broader RML research community.
Outside of work, Danelski explored western Montana: hiking, camping, fishing, going to rodeos, and taking in the scenery, with a standing morning greeting for the longhorn cattle next door. He also made trips to Yellowstone and Glacier National Park, taking in the wildlife and geology of both.
Iyanu Nafiu '27 (Electrical Engineering)
This summer, Iyanu Nafiu '27, a junior studying Electrical Engineering living in the Bronx, worked as a Hardware Engineering Intern at Dell Technologies in Hopkinton, MA, on projects that speed up the hardware validation process.
Validating a server board — confirming that every component works as designed before it ships — has traditionally depended on engineers manually tracing circuit documentation to find the right places to test. That process is arduous and fails to scale well as board designs grow more complex. Nafiu's work this summer is aimed at automating a piece of that pipeline.
On the main project, Nafiu used AI to parse server board netlists and identify candidate probe locations — the specific points on a board where a physical probe needs to make contact to test a connection. First, his team trained a model to assemble structured graphs of signal paths and component connections from netlist data. Then, his tool extracts physical XY coordinates of these components directly from the board layout file. From there, Nafiu and his team programmed a flying probe machine, a piece of test equipment that moves a probe to precise coordinates on a board automatically checking the fail points engineers most commonly encounter.
Automating documentation parsing and probe placement shortens the path from board design to validated hardware, work that matters as server demand climbs alongside AI infrastructure buildout. It's also a case study in a broader shift happening across hardware engineering: using AI not just to design faster, but to test and validate faster too.
Outside of work, Nafiu has volunteered with his cohort and coworkers at a nearby farm and food bank, and has spent his free time hiking around Massachusetts.
Louisa Kinsley '28 (Chemical Engineering)
This summer, Louisa Kinsley '28, a junior studying Chemical Engineering from Scituate, MA, worked as a NASA Analytical Chemistry Research Intern at Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD, using mass spectrometry to help lay the chemical groundwork for future lab analyses and missions to the solar system's ocean worlds.
Beneath their icy shells, moons like Titan, Enceladus, and Europa are hypothesized to hide liquid water oceans, making them some of the most promising places in the solar system to search for life. Before a spacecraft can go looking for biosignatures (signs of life) in the plumes or ice of these moons, scientists need to know what a positive detection would actually look like, and what background noise might get in the way. High salt content in ocean-world-like solutions can suppress or distort a mass spectrometry signal, so building reliable reference data in the lab first is a prerequisite for trusting any signal read from another moon.
Kinsley, working with Xiang Li and Joey Pasterski, used Matrix-Assisted Laser Desorption/Ionization Time-of-Flight (MALDI-TOF) mass spectrometry to analyze analog samples — laboratory stand-ins for the salty, icy chemistry expected on Titan, Enceladus, and Europa. She focused on analog samples collected by the ICYCLE project team from Sukok Lake, a thermokarst lake on the northern tip of Alaska. These salty lakes contain organic compounds and are important analogs for ocean worlds. By characterizing how known compounds show up under MALDI-TOF in these conditions, Kinsley is helping build the analytical baselines that future mission instruments will be measured against.
These baselines are critical because ocean-world missions get one shot at their data. An instrument millions of miles from Earth can't be recalibrated on the fly, so the reference chemistry has to be worked out in advance to ensure a real biosignature can be told apart from an artifact of the sample matrix. Kinsley's work feeds directly into that effort, supporting the broader astrobiology case for returning to Titan, Enceladus, and Europa.
"I love the people and the community," Kinsley says. "My mentors are so awesome, and everyone here is so willing to help each other learn."
Outside of work, Kinsley takes regular trips into Washington, D.C. to explore its museums and historical sites, and spends her free time running and hiking.
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Published Date
Sep 16, 2026
