Internships
Exciting learning opportunities at the edge of Business and Science
Fluorescent microscopes are a key instrument for scientific learning in the health and life sciences. Image restoration and analysis are crucial tools to extract knowledge from the microscopic data. SVI is an internationally recognized specialist in image restoration and we work at the edge of scientific developments to enable easy and reliable image analysis for the life sciences.
Traineeships take place at our headquarters in Hilversum, conveniently located near Hilversum Sportpark train station and close to the highway exit. The minimum duration for internships is 4 months. We also have a limited number of short projects of ~2 month duration available.
Science, Science and Communication internships
Project 1. Science communication: The Huygens Imaging Academy(HIA) is SVI's online wiki database aimed at spreading knowledge on image analysis. In this internship, you will expand and improve the HIA by 1) creating figures and accompanying texts to communicate scientific meaning 2) analyze and plot existing datasets to create new content 3) synthesize existing pages to increase clarity.
Level: Master
Topic: science, science and communication
Project 2. Application Note: autofluorescence correction of many-channel in situ staining.
Sequential staining allows for a dramatic increase in the number of markers that may be inspected in biological sample. By sequentially washing in an antibody, imaging and washing out, conventional limitations with respect to the spectral mixing and crosstalk may be overcome. The increased number of markers on the same specimen enables researchers to screen for more phenomena on the same sample. Yet, autofluorescence remains an issue that taints all channels and cannot be washed out, thereby deteriorating image quality.
The Huygens crosstalk corrector is a powerful tool can detect cross-talk for many channels simultaneously and subsequentially correct for it. Autofluorescence is one such source of crosstalk, regular spectral overlap another.
In this project, you will apply the Huygens crosstalk corrector on existing data, pushing the tool to its limits. You will analyze and restore the crosstalk corrected data. Upon succesful restoration, you will create an Application Note: a brief scientific publication detailing the performance of Huygens tools, containing attractive and intelligible graphics and a description of the method.
Level: Master
Topic: Science
Project 3. Application Note: RNA FISH quantification
RNA Fluorescence In Situ Hybridization (FISH) is a powerful method were a target RNA strand is being hybridized with a piece of synthetic complementary DNA labelled with a fluorescent probe. By subsequentially creating a 3D image of the cell or tissue, the precise localization of the target RNA may be obtained. This method is often combined with additional markers in other channels to obtain colocalization information.
RNA-fish markers are often visible as diffraction limited spots. Due to their small size, they are quite sensitive to crosstalk, chromatic aberration, blur and noise, all of which deteriorate image quality. The Huygens restoration tools can very effectively restore these imaging effects. After restoration, a quantitative analysis of the result is required.
In this project, you will first restore raw RNA FISH data and thereafter perform quantitative analysis. Upon succesful restoration and analysis, you will create an Application Note: a brief scientific publication detailing the performance of Huygens tools, containing attractive and intelligible graphics and a description of the method.
Level: Master
Topic: Science
Several Application Notes may be combined depending on the duration of the internship.
Life science and business Internships
About SVI
Scientific Volume Imaging (SVI) is a world leader in fluorescent microscopy image analysis. Fluorescence microscopy is a work-horse in the ongoing life science revolution. Yet microscopic images are meaningless without the proper tools to restore and analyze them. Having intimate knowledge of technological drivers and key players in the market, SVI is poised to play an increasingly important role in this growing market.
Internship topic
In this internship, you will be focussing on developing commercial opportunities in the developmental biology market. Developmental biology studies life at the level of tissues and organs, or even whole organisms. This market includes 1) organoids and organ-on-a-chip application, 2) zebrafish, drosophila and C. Elegans imaging, 3) whole tissue imaging applications. More than other research segments, this market yields novel insights that are highly applicable in the pharmaceutical industry. Due to the large size of the images, this market has a lot of demand for technological advanced images processing, which SVI is uniquely able to provide.
Daily activities
You will be supporting one of our experienced scientific imaging consultants in their daily sales and marketing activities. This includes 1) generating sales opportunities by means of contacting new or existing prospects, 2) sharpening your value proposition by understanding the specific needs of your segments and 3) generating sales and marketing materials that are in support thereof. In general, we look to tune the internship to the applicants unique talents and are open to initiatives from their side. As you will be directly supporting one of our consultants, this ensures a good supervision and diversity of tasks.
Requirements
- HBO or MSc University students
- Prior experience in life sciences and preferably in fluorescence microscopy
- Interest in Sales and Marketing
Job opportunities after this internship
This internships prepares you for the Scientific Imaging Concultant track within SVI. SVI is actively recruiting Scientific Imaging Consultants and a succesful internship may lead to a job offer when we see a good match with SVI's needs.
In general this internship provides you with a thorough skillset for commercial and business roles in the life science industry.
Our current Development assignments are intended for Master students (e.g. Scientific Programming with Mathematical or Physics background) and for Bachelor students with a Minor in computational sciences, both from within the EU.
If you have a related topic that is not specifically mentioned in the list below, send us a short description so that we can see whether it fits with our interest. Traineeships related to the topics mentioned below can start immediately.
1. Mathematical morphology: convex hull
language: C
level: Masters
2. Modeling of shading patterns in SPIM microscopy
language: C/Tcl
level: Bachelors/Masters
3. 'Casual' web-based colocalization analysis
language: Tcl/PHP
level: Informatics, Bachelors
4. AI, Deep learning Object Tracking and Object Analysis
language: C/CUDA
level: Masters
5. SFP volume rendering on GPUs
language: C/CUDA
level: Masters
6. Semi-interactive, web-based PSF distiller
language: PHP/JavaScript/Tcl
level: Bachelors/Masters
7. CUDA implementation of image processing operations
language: C, CUDA
level: Bachelors/Masters
Interested? Send your CV and motivation to jobs at svi.nl, more contact information here