Welcome to our Google Summer of Code scholars for 2025! (OREL)

Orthogonal Lab Director Bradly Alicea welcomes 2025 Google Summer of Code Contributors and commences 2025 OREL Summer Cohort

The Orthogonal Research and Education Laboratory is pleased to welcome three students to the lab as Google Summer of Code (GSoC) scholars. Two (Lalith Baru and Jayadratha Gayen) will be joining the DevoWorm group and one (Vidhi Rohira) will be joining the Open-source Sustainability project.

Lalith and Jayadratha will be working on different aspects of our DevoGraph project (Github). Lalith’s successful project proposal is called “NDP-HNN: Modelling Neural Developmental Programs of C. elegans Using Growing Hypergraph Neural Networks”, while Jayadratha’s successful project proposal is called “DevoTG: Dynamic Graph Neural Networks for Modeling C. elegans Development”. Good luck to both of them! They will be working with the DevoWorm group and active in our weekly meetings. They will also be hosted by the OpenWorm Foundation and contributing to their mission.

Vidhi will be contributing to OREL’s Open-source Sustainability project (Github) by working at the intersection of Reinforcement Learning and Agent-based Modeling. Vidhi’s successful project proposal is called “SustainHub: Adaptive Agent-Based Model for Open-Source Community Sustainability”. Check out her updates as part of the Saturday Morning NeuroSim meeting series.

We have also invited our unsuccessful candidates to join our Open-source interest group. We host this meeting every Friday at 12 Noon Eastern time, and cover promoting open-source practices, project development, and project management education.

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the International Neuroinformatics Coordination Facility and The OpenWorm Foundation for continued funding and support during Google Summer of Code.

For more about OREL’s legacy of Google Summer of Code & Summer Cohort, view our GSoC & Summer Cohort program page.