Caltech Students Experience Startup Life Through the SUSI Program

This summer is the second year of the Summer Undergraduate Startup Internship (SUSI) program, funded by Caltech alumnus Olivier Cojot-Goldberg (BS '87, MS '88) and organized under The Ronald and Maxine Linde Institute of Economic and Management Sciences. The SUSI program helps place Caltech undergraduates into 10-week internships in real-world entrepreneurial environments.

Cody Lim, a rising junior majoring in bioengineering, is spending his summer at Provivi, a Caltech startup in Santa Monica with a focus on pest control. Lim is researching how insect pheromones might be used as a safer alternative to traditional pesticides.

Sophomore Grace Peng, a computer science major, is working at Virtualitics, a Pasadena-based startup that develops advanced data analytics software that merges AI with virtual reality. She is working with 3-D scatter plots in VR data visualization software for Oculus Rift and, in particular, developing an algorithm to build surface plots from datasets through Unity 3D.

Forza Silicon Corporation hired four SUSI interns for the summer: sophomore David Kornfeld, senior Grace Ma, and junior Julia Yang (all electrical engineering majors), and junior Amy Zhou (computer science). Forza is a fabless semiconductor company that engages in the design and production of custom integrated circuits (ICs). As an example of the interns' work at Forza, Ma is designing and implementing a high-speed serial data interconnect between field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to enable communication between multiple FPGAs and image sensor probe cards.