Meet our Young Scholar Program student, Samuel Cox!
Sam spent six weeks this summer working with IRIS affiliates Dr. Félix Santiago-Collazo and Orlando Viloria-Marimón in the Compound Inundation Team for Resilient Applications (CITRA) Lab, as part of the Summer Youth Program.

The Young Scholars Program (YSP) is a paid five-week summer internship for high school students interested in environmental science. Students work 30 hours per week to actively engage with research under the guidance of a faculty mentor and present their research at the Young Scholars Pre-Collegiate Research Conference held in the final three days of the program.
Learn more about the research Sam assisted with and his time at IRIS below!
What were you working on this summer?
They brought me on to work with Orlando, who’s working on what’s called a compound inundation map of the entire island of Puerto Rico. What he’s going to do is combine floodwater from the sea from inundation and floodwater from rain, or precipitation-based flooding, and kind of combine those to create a more accurate inundation map during hurricanes, where storm surge comes into play. My part of that was just to work on one piece of Puerto Rico, the Maunabo River Basin. I ended up learning how to make 2D hydrological models, kind of on a practice level. And then in the second half of my internship, I actually modeled one basin in Puerto Rico, the Maunabo basin. They wanted to see the differences between infiltration and no infiltration, and how that will impact their greater project and the scope of what they’re going to be doing over the next couple of years, so it’s kind of a trial run.

Did you take anything away from this experience that you feel helped prepare you for the future?
Definitely learning by doing. In school, they give you all the information to study for a test or project, and you need to memorize that information and make sure you know it backwards and forwards, so you can do well on the assessment that they’re going to give you at the end of the class. But with this, it’s about learning how to work with what you’ve got and make decisions based on what you’ve got. And then learning how to lean on other people that know what they’re doing, and the expertise and the reasons behind everything, and to just kind of trust in the process.
What was the biggest challenge for you?
I had really no background in hydrology or anything like that. All the water mechanics, the physics and all that’s tied to it, and I just really had no clue about. I haven’t taken a physics class since eighth grade. So, it was definitely a lot to get started out. But like I said, they gave me a nice crash course. I went through a couple of textbooks and tried to grasp as much as I could. But not having that foundation coming into it was probably the biggest challenge. Thankfully their expertise really got me through a lot of that. I’m not an expert by any means or even you know, knowledgeable, but I gained enough knowledge to get me through what I needed to do.

Was there anyone who made an especially big impact on you?
Felix and Orlando were both really great teachers. Orlando put up with a lot of my not knowing what to do. He was really great. I’m really blessed to say that I was selected, it’s been a great experience.
Anything final you’d like to share?
I just really want to thank everyone at YSP and at CITRA that welcomed me, the people that incorporated me into their everyday life and what they do. Dr. Santiago didn’t shy away from letting me join their meetings and stuff like that. He’s even still working on opportunities for me continuing on now that the internship is over. So I’m really appreciative of that, and then Miss Aria Rechenbach (UGA’s YSP Coordinator), she’s really worked really hard to make this whole program work. All the chaperones, everyone that that worked hard all summer to do all of this, and all the other interns that I was with- just learning from them, hanging out with them. It was really a great summer.
Learn more about the CITRA Lab’s work on flood modeling in Puerto Rico, sponsored by the Caribbean Coastal Ocean Observing System on their website (click here).
