Google Summer of Code Students 2026

We’re excited to welcome three contributors to MDAnalysis through Google Summer of Code this year: @jauy123, @kunjsinha, and @PardhavMaradani.

This marks our seventh consecutive year participating as an independent GSoC organization. A big thank you goes out to Google for supporting these three exciting projects. We’re looking forward to getting started!

Kunj Sinha: Interface for post-simulation analysis (“crawling”) of WESTPA simulations

This project will implement WESTPAParser and WESTPAReader inside westpa/westpa, exposing WESTPA’s HDF5 Framework simulation data as a standard MDAnalysis Universe. Post-simulation analysis currently requires custom boilerplate code via w_crawl which this project will replace with a single command, making the entire MDAnalysis toolkit accessible on WESTPA data.

Kunj is an undergraduate student at PES University, pursuing a Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science and Engineering. He has always had an interest in various fields of science and technology since his early school days. In his free time, he listens to music, plays different musical instruments and enjoys cooking as well.

You can find Kunj on Github and LinkedIn.

To keep up with his work, you can check out his blog.

Pardhav Maradani: Dashboard for tracking MD simulation progress with the new streaming interface

This project will develop a browser-based, real-time dashboard for molecular dynamics simulations using the new IMDv3 streaming protocol, enabling live monitoring, analysis, and visualization of running simulations. The dashboard will leverage imdclient and MDAnalysis to receive and analyze data streams from running simulations.

Pardhav is an undergraduate student from India pursuing a Bachelors in Computer Science and Engineering from Vellore Institute of Technology (Vellore) and a BS in Data Science and Applications from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras.

You can find Pardhav on GitHub @PardhavMaradani.

To see updates on this project, you can check out his blog.

Josh Uy: Adding Additional Functionality and Enhancements to the Fetcher Module

This project intends to add web retrieval functionality to MDAnalysis by augmenting the existing fetcher module. By introducing new fetchers, it is intended to allow MDAnalysis to download structures and trajectories from external databases such as AlphaFold and the Molecular Dynamics Data Bank by passing downloaded data to the in-built Universe class. Additionally, this project intends to introduce a new suite of functions that is capable of retrieving any molecular data from any database supporting REST API.

Joshua Raphael Uy is a Physics Ph.D student at Arizona State University. He earned a Bachelor of Science in Physics, a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and a Master in Science in Physics at Arizona State University. He has a bio page and a Linkedin.

To follow this project, you can check out Josh’s blog.

— @amruthesht @BradyAJohnston @HeydenLabASU @jeremyleung521 @ltchong @nilay-v3rma @orbeckst @talagayev @yuxuanzhuang @IAlibay @jennaswa (@MDAnalysis/gsoc-mentors and org admins)