ATLANTA — Imagine what a contingent of smart, dedicated, civic-minded young people spread out across Georgia and the South could do to help communities address real-world challenges using AI applications, data, technology, and research. That’s what the interns in the 2025 Partnership for Innovation (PIN) Summer Internship have been doing this summer. What started as a program with just five interns, six years ago, has grown into a powerhouse of 103 interns working on 51 projects in 27 communities in Georgia, Alabama, Virginia, and Texas, this year.
“The Southeast Crescent Regional Commission played a major role in the Summer PINternship’s growth this year,” said Cody Cocchi, PIN’s student engagement manager, “especially in the Georgia communities south of Atlanta.”
The Southeast Crescent Regional Commission (SCRC) is a federal-state partnership that promotes economic development in parts of Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and all of Florida. The organization invests in infrastructure, business development, natural resources, and workforce development projects with the goal of helping create jobs, build communities, and improve lives.
According to SCRC Executive Director Christopher McKinney, the intern program is a great way for the two organizations to work together, because, he said, “You get nowhere by yourself. There’s always somebody with a hand up, a hand out, helping you up. I learned it’s my job to have a hand back to help somebody else.”
SCRC provided a State Economic Infrastructure Development (SEID) grant to fund 17 projects this summer, including Kids-Doc-on-Wheels, in Clarkston, which provides healthcare to uninsured children; a data hub for the Georgia Municipal Association; work on fostering regional collaboration at the Okefenokee Swamp; monitoring air quality in Jesup, for the Gullah Geechee Chamber Foundation; support for a startup accelerator in Albany; studies to address regional housing needs and solar farms in Camilla; development of a wearable device to monitor heart health at the University of Georgia in Athens; and several projects in conjunction with Native American tribes in Georgia.
“This was a project that really addressed some of our Southeast Crescent Regional Commission goals around workforce development and talent in the region,” said Christopher Nunn, commissioner of the Georgia Department of Community Affairs and a member of the SCRC and PIN boards. “This is about impacting the entire region … communities that have a lot of potential, but also a lot of poverty and a lot of distress.”
Shoring up Food Security in Whigham
The Lower Muskogee Creek Tribe in Whigham, Georgia, has 3,700 members and owns 68 acres of land in the South Georgia community, according to Tribal Principal Chief Vonnie McCormick. A chance encounter with Cocchi at a meeting resulted in an opportunity for the tribe to be part of the PIN Summer Internship.
The tribe has two greenhouses where it is using aquaponics to grow food primarily for local use. Aquaponics combines aquaculture — raising aquatic animals, in this case bluegill — with hydroponics, which means growing plants without soil. It’s a closed-loop food system where the fish provide nutrients in the water for the plants, and the plants filter the water that is used for the fish. In addition to raising bluegill, the tribe has grown strawberries, herbs, broccoli, lettuces, and mint. This type of food production requires technology to monitor pH, algae, and temperature levels in the water.
Once the technology is up and running, the closed-loop system nearly runs itself, McCormick said. “If something goes wrong, [the technology] will alert us to let us know something is wrong in that system, and somebody can immediately go to it,” she added.
This summer, that somebody might be Bronwyn Armitage, the SCRC-funded PIN Summer Intern living and working in Whigham, whose work for the project, Smart Agriculture for Tribal Food Security, involves helping set up and secure the technology needed in the greenhouses.
Armitage, a rising third year environmental engineering major at Georgia Tech, worked as a 2024 PIN Summer Intern in South Atlanta, gardening and raising awareness about the Browns Mill area as a food desert. This opportunity, also in food, is what drew her back to the program.
“One of the things I’ve been doing a lot lately at Tech is aquaponics,” Armitage, who manages the community garden on Tech’s campus, said. “What I’ll be doing with this project is gaining some experience with a full-on system that we would not be able to fit on Tech’s campus. On top of that, I’ll get more experience with smart technology, which I haven’t worked with so much.”
An organization like PIN, focused on innovation and technology, made this program a great fit for the Lower Muskogee Creek Tribe, McCormick said.
“It gives me an opportunity to work with students that have the technology to help us with things that we don’t have the knowledge of,” she said. “I’m so proud to be a part of this.”
Supporting Heart Health in Athens
Some 240 miles northeast of Whigham, at the University of Georgia (UGA), SCRC is supporting a project, Validation and Dissemination of an Open Source Biometric Wearable Device to Monitor Heart Health, designed to identify changes to heart health in teenagers before they reach a clinical level.
“Specifically, we wanted to look at whether stress was impacting heart rate variability for [teens] on a day-to-day basis,” said Jessica Knight, associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics in the College of Public Health at UGA.
For the pilot program, Knight and her team recruited 24 teens and their mothers to wear watches that they had programmed specifically for their needs.
“We can use [the watch] to measure heart rate and heart rate variability throughout the day,” Knight said. “We can also program it to send people surveys that they can answer through the watch. For the pilot, we had families wear it for five days. Four times a day we had them answer questions about how stressed they were and then do a measurement of their heart rate.”
The PIN Summer Interns are taking the collected pilot data and evaluating it to determine how accurate the monitor is when measuring heart rate variability.
Bipin Koirala, who is in the Ph.D. program in machine learning at Georgia Tech, is one of the interns on this project. He was drawn to it, he said, because of the opportunity to work on a project related to public health.
“I specifically got interested in this project because it aims to make heart health more accessible to the general public, which resonated with me,” he said.
Koirala is one of three interns on the project. His work involves “developing machine learning models to validate, enhance, and interpret this wearable device, the heart rate variability signals in adolescents and mothers, with the goal of linking heart rate variability fluctuations to stress exposure … in daily life.”
For Knight, the interns have been a rousing success. “They’ve gone above and beyond,” she said of their work. “[Bipin] programmed this interface that we can use to look at the signals and really weed through them. It’s a lot of data. It’s hard to go through and visualize if you don’t have a systematic way to do it. He created this program to allow us to do it, and not only to allow us — me and the PIN interns — but I also have a couple of master of public health students. He made it in a user-friendly way so they can use it as well, even without the computer science background.”
As for whether they’d recommend the PIN Summer Intern program to others, Koirala and Knight both agreed that they would.
“It is a really great opportunity if you have a project where you are looking for students who are outside your direct area, and you have something mutually beneficial to offer,” Knight said. “I think it worked well for this project, because all three of the interns were looking for experience with real world data that had true application, and I was looking for people who had the computer science background that I don’t have and that the other students that I work with in my department don’t have.”
“Projects like these in Whigham and Athens show how important the SCRC funding can be,” Cocchi said. “It is helping PIN meet its mission of supporting innovation that improves lives in communities across Georgia.”