As the summer comes to a close, SPHERE would like to thank our 2026 interns for a productive summer and the many contributions they made to the project.

This year, 23 students participated in SPHERE internships, including 18 interns working onsite with SPHERE teams at the USC Information Sciences Institute in Marina del Rey, Northeastern University in Boston, and the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, as well as five virtual interns working remotely.

Throughout the summer, the interns worked closely with SPHERE researchers, developers, and operations staff on projects that contribute directly to the research infrastructure. Their work spanned a wide range of areas, including expanding SPHERE support for IoT and industrial control systems, improving experiment workflows and automation, developing reusable research artifacts, and strengthening the software and operational systems that support the testbed.

The interns capped off the summer with the 2026 SPHERE Intern Showcase, where they presented their projects, demonstrated what they had accomplished, and discussed opportunities for future work. Many of the products of their internships will be integrated into SPHERE and made available for use by the cybersecurity and privacy research community.

We are grateful to all of our interns for their hard work, creativity, and enthusiasm, as well as to the SPHERE team members who mentored and supported them throughout the summer. We hope the experience helped our interns develop new skills, gain valuable experience working on research infrastructure, and learn more about cybersecurity and privacy research.

We wish all of our interns continued success in their studies, research, and future endeavors, and we look forward to seeing where their paths take them next.

SPHERE is an NSF-funded research infrastructure designed to support innovative and reproducible cybersecurity and privacy research and education. Researchers, educators, and students interested in using SPHERE or getting involved with the project can learn more through the SPHERE website.