What I'm Doing This Summer: La Precious Shannon ’25

What are you doing this summer?

I’m living and working at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. I’m part of the National Science Foundation Research Experiences for Undergraduates project.

What’s your research?

I’m working on a computational sediment transport project. Essentially that means I’m studying erosion and what to do about it. Louisiana has been losing approximately 25 square miles of land per year due to sea levels rising. Rising temperatures and rising seas lead to coastal erosion. This is not only affecting Louisiana but the entire U.S. Gulf Coast.

How are you addressing erosion?

I’m working with OpenFOAM, a C++ tool used to solve problems in computational fluid dynamics. I’m just learning what OpenFOAM is and how to work with it, but basically I’m looking at the Louisiana coastline: Beneath the water you have the ocean floor and it’s mostly sediment. And on the ocean floor you have pipelines; they carry crude oil. The shoreline is under threat. Rising seas pull soil from the shore and into the ocean, and storms remove sediment from beneath the pipelines, making the pipelines unstable. My project this summer is to build a computer-based simulation of the shoreline. I simulate extreme weather, generate data using Jupyter Notebook and OpenFOAM, and then train AI using the data I’ve collected. The AI should then be able to predict what will happen to the shore, to the sea floor, and to the pipelines in extreme weather.

So you’re going to save the shoreline?

I’m one person among many who are investigating ways to stabilize the shoreline.

But you’re an electrical engineering major, right?

Yes, I’m an engineering major with an electrical engineering concentration. At first I wasn’t sure I wanted to do a summer research project in fluid dynamics, but then I thought, why not? I get to code and I get to fight erosion and I get to work with machine learning and AI. Any work with AI is applicable to almost any career, in engineering or outside of it.

How did you find out about this project?

I stumbled across the National Science Foundation website and found the Research Experiences for Undergraduates program. I applied to a bunch of projects at a bunch of schools. LSU said yes.

What’s your advice to other students?

Don’t procrastinate like I did. Don’t wait until the last week to apply. Stay open to projects outside your major. And stay in touch with your advisers. Gennifer Smith is my academic adviser and she was my professor for Project and Design II, Physics 151, and Sensors Through History. She wrote a letter of recommendation for me. Sean Olson wrote me a letter, too. Reach out to your professors! They’re all nice people.