WINLAB Summer Internship Program Provides Hands-On Wireless Research Opportunities
Rutgers University’s Wireless Information Network Laboratory (WINLAB) 2026 summer internship program brought together more than 70 graduate, undergraduate, and high school students. Over a ten-week period, interns worked in team-based research groups under faculty mentorship to tackle cutting-edge problems in wireless technologies, smart cities, and applied artificial intelligence.
The program culminated in a public Open House, where the project teams presented their work through talks, demonstrations, and posters on a range of topics, including:
- Using Meta VR headsets to enable activity recognition without extra wearables or cameras
- Emulating LEO-to-LEO and LEO-to-GEO satellite interference through software-defined radios to support energy management in Open Radio Access Networks
- Building and training miniature autonomous vehicles to navigate smart-intersection environments using low-latency cameras and AI-enabled autonomous communication discovery
- Constructing a digital twin of a human cell as an educational tool for students to interactively explore cellular structures
Why It Matters
Thanks to the resources and equipment made available through the COSMOS testbed, WINLAB serves as a training ground for the next generation of engineers and researchers. The students built technical skills through software-defined radios, edge-cloud computing, and real deployed infrastructure on the COSMOS testbed. This enabled experiments, from satellite-spectrum coexistence to smart-city sensing, that are difficult to replicate in a conventional classroom setting.
Interns joined real-world, ongoing research efforts, meaning they saw firsthand how research problems don’t stop just because the summer ends. The opportunity to contribute to research larger in scope helps bridge the gap between coursework and the practice of engineering in industry and academia.
One intern, Ansel Kurien, shared, “WINLAB gave me the opportunity to showcase my technical skills through working on a real project that affects the world. I’m grateful for the valuable experience I was able to acquire.”
Learn more about the COSMOS testbed and the WINLAB summer internship program. In addition, see the projects from the 2026 Open House here.
About COSMOS
COSMOS is part of the National Science Foundation’s PAWR program and is funded in part by NSF and by the PAWR Industry Consortium.
