September 30, 2025
Recent ACCESS-NRI PhD intern, Claire Yung
In this conversation we speak with Claire Yung about her experience doing a PhD internship at ACCESS-NRI, which focused on modelling ice shelf cavities.
Tell me a bit about yourself, your career so far, and why you decided to do a PhD, and an internship at ACCESS-NRI.
I’ve always been interested in science, maths and coding from a young age. I studied a physics degree at the Australian National University, and did my Honours in the Climate and Fluid Physics group at the Research School of Earth Sciences, which was fun. After that I decided to do a PhD in that same group, doing ocean modelling and oceanography.
In both my Honours and PhD, COSIMA (the Consortium for Ocean-Sea Ice Modelling in Australia) has been important to my research projects and career, with both the vibrant community and the COSIMA ocean models. It was really exciting to see ACCESS-NRI join this space and start working on the next generation of models.
In my PhD project, I’m mainly focusing on ice shelf cavities (the ocean below ice shelves), which is a component of the future ACCESS-OM3 ocean models. So it was a great opportunity to come to ACCESS-NRI and do an internship that linked my PhD research with ACCESS-NRI models.
What drew you to study ice shelves?
I have always found Antarctica to be a fascinating place. Doing oceanography is a cool way to combine physics and climate, which is important for me. Antarctic ice shelves are one of the current frontiers of Antarctic ocean modelling, because models are starting to include ice shelves, and that’s allowing us to answer new science questions.
What did you do during your internship at ACCESS-NRI?
Image produced by Claire Yung using the model output of the new pan-Antarctic model with ice shelves
In my internship I worked with the ocean—sea ice and regional modelling teams to develop a regional pan-Antarctic ACCESS-OM3 model, first without ice shelves and then with ice shelf cavities included. This means we can now simulate the interaction between Antarctic ice shelves and the ocean beneath. This project involved working with the ocean team and other teams at ACCESS-NRI to set up the model, get all the right input files and configurations, run it, optimise it, and evaluate it.
I also worked with some collaborators at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, who already use ice shelves in MOM6 (Modular Ocean Model version 6), to get the pieces together so that the ice shelf-ocean model could run with the ACCESS-OM3 infrastructure.
How does your experience as an ACCESS-NRI intern compare to what you initially expected?
I had a pretty good idea going into the internship that it would be quite different from my normal research group in that there is such a diverse range of work that people do at ACCESS-NRI to support all the models and community.
The other difference was the focus on reproducibility. The reproducibility aspect of models isn’t something that is hugely stressed in academia. It’s important, but it’s not people’s main worry. So it was interesting to learn about all the infrastructure that goes into that at ACCESS-NRI.
The culture at ACCESS-NRI was also super welcoming. That made it really easy to transition into working there during the internship.
What advice would you give to other PhD students considering an internship at ACCESS-NRI?
Definitely go for it! It was a good opportunity to build some new skills and get some new connections and meet people. It was also a nice side project to the PhD.
I would recommend the ACCESS-NRI internship for people who don’t do anything related to climate and ocean modelling because you can learn about the field and how the models work. But I’d also recommend it for people who already do ocean modelling: it was a really good experience to get into the weeds, develop more understanding about how all the complicated model parts work, and have a hands-on experience.
What does the future look like to you from here?
Well, I have to finish the PhD first, where I have about a year left. After that we will just have to see. I’m hopeful that my future will include some type of oceanography and models.