Lunch with the Mitacs Globalink interns, past and present

DENOS Lab took its Mitacs Globalink Research Internship (GRI) students out to lunch in Calgary on September 17, 2026, to thank them for what they have brought to the lab. Haniya Farhan and Muhammad Ahmed joined the lab as 2026 GRI interns, and Zainab Saad, who came through the 2024 cohort and is now completing her MSc at DENOS Lab, sat at the same table as the clearest answer to where a Globalink summer can lead. Gerry Wu and Musa Taib came along as the mentors who work with the interns week to week, and Dr. Steve Drew rounded out the table.

Much of the conversation was Gerry and Musa talking through what mentoring has taught them. Both of them supervise students who arrive for a single summer, which means scoping a question so it can be answered in a few months, handing over enough context in the first weeks for someone to work independently, and knowing when to let an intern take the project somewhere the mentor had not planned. Haniya is building a scoping review of agentic AI in health, mapping how autonomous large language model agents are reaching clinical and health system settings, and Muhammad has been working alongside her on the lab’s agentic and federated learning efforts. Zainab’s own path from a Globalink summer to co-authoring Starfish-FL: Harnessing Agentic Federated Analytics and the lab’s carbon-aware orchestration work gave the newer interns a concrete sense of how far a first project can travel.

The Globalink program brings undergraduate students from around the world into Canadian research labs, and for DENOS it has been one of the surest ways to find people who stay involved long after the summer ends. Thank you Haniya, Muhammad, and Zainab for the work, and thank you Gerry and Musa for the mentoring that makes these internships worth the trip.