2,893 Inspirational Passion Project Ideas
Turn inspirations into your passion project.
This collection of project ideas, shared by Polygence mentors, is meant to help inspire student thinking about their own project. Students are in the driver seat of their research and are free to use any or none of the ideas shared by their mentors.
- AI/ML
- Animation
- Arts
- Biology
- Biotech
- Business
- Cancer
- Chemistry
- Cognitive
- Computer Science
- Creative Writing
- Dance
- Dentistry
- Economics
- Engineering
- Entomology
- Environmental Science
- Ethics
- Fashion
- Finance
- Game Design
- Healthcare
- History
- Illustration
- Languages
- Linguistics
- Literature
- Math
- Medicine
- Music
- Neuroscience
- Nutrition
- Organizational Leadership
- Philanthropy
- Philosophy
- Photography
- Physics
- Psychiatry
- Psychology
- Public Health
- Quantitative
- Social
- Social Science
- Sports Analytics
- Statistics
- Surgery
Understanding host-pathogen interactions
Intracellular pathogens, such as bacteria and viruses, infect cells of their host as part of their lifecycle. They must also be able to adapt and manipulate their host in favor of their own survival. This begins at the initial step of a pathogen binding to the outer membrane of the cellular host. This is a crucial step as the pathogen must adapt so that it can both successfully enter the host without triggering the defence mechanism and also be specific enough to infect the cell it can replicate in. Once the pathogen enters, it must make more copies of itself to complete the lifecycle while simultaneously acquiring all the essential nutrients and building blocks. It is also fighting against the host to keep the defence system at bay. All pathogens have different approaches to how they interact with their host to ultimately make more copies of itself at every step of its lifecycle. In this project, you will write a scientific review or a journal article explaining how a pathogen of your choice interacts and manipulates their cellular host to complete its life-cycle. You will learn how to read scientific literature, identify gaps in research, and communicate your findings. In addition you will learn various concepts of microbiology and cellular biology, specifically in the topic of host-pathogen interactions. I will guide you through every step of the project, including understanding the biology that you may not be familiar with.
Biology
Can a TedTalk Change Society's Perception?
Schizophrenia is a neurological disease that is poorly understood by the public. This project would involve creation of a survey to evaluate if a TedTalk given by an individual with schizophrenia could change a person's initial perception of the disease. In this project, a student would create and administer a pre and post-survey to evaluate if this made people think differently.
Biology
Creating a Science Blog
The best way to learn is by enjoying what you are doing. Do you have a passion or interest in a specific scientific area that you love talking about? Are you interested in science communication? Creating a blog (or podcast, etc.) is a great way to practice clear and concise explanation of scientific topics, making it easy for anyone to understand. This is also an excellent foundation to start creating a portfolio that showcases your work.
Biology, Neuroscience, Cognitive, Medicine
The Future of Ancient DNA
Ancient DNA is growing more popular as our genetic sequencing technology becomes more advanced. Last year, the Nobel prize in physiology and medicine was given to one of the pioneers of ancient DNA! With it's increasing popularity, it's important to understand what questions ancient DNA can and should be applied to. There are many limitations with this type of data and a comprehensive review has yet to be done on best practices. This project would look at how ancient DNA research is being conducted across many species of plant and animal and summarize what the best way to do research going forward would be.
Biology, Math
Predicting co-viral infection in SARS-CoV-2 patients and the outcomes of coinfection
While we now have relatively fast diagnostic tests to determine if a patient has COVID-19 or not, patients testing positive may also have another viral infection that may have similar symptoms to COVID-19 and thus may not be detected. An example of this is a patient with both a COVID-19 and a influenza infection. Such coinfections may lead to worst symptoms outcomes and patients may need additional care. As such, it would be useful to have a model to predict if a patient is likely to have a coinfection (and if so, what virus?), and to study the impact of such co-infection. This would allow physicians to allocate different levels and types of resources in order to improve outcomes and the severity of symptoms.
Biology, Cancer, Engineering, AI/ML
Medication compliance tool
Create a system/product to help parents remember to give their children medication consistently and timely. promote communication between multiple caregivers regarding dispensing of medication for a dependent.
Psychiatry, Biology, Medicine
Important Molecular Pathways In Cancer
What are the hallmarks of cancer? Which pathways are most commonly found in cancer and their role in cancer emergence and progression?
Biology, Cancer
Chemical Education without Barriers
Teach Chemistry students of all ages Chemical Education through varying different means (podcast, accessible website that simplifies material, videos/posters providing summary of a certain topic.)
Biology, Chemistry, Public Health
Science Communication Blog/Page
Communicating scientific findings to the general population, in a way that is intriguing and accurate, is a feat that many scientists are working diligently to accomplish. You can contribute to this by starting a blog about any subject of choice (i.e. a neurodegenerative disease, technical advancements in the field, use of human stem cells, etc) and accurately summarizing the key findings of nominal papers in the field. Each blog page/post will be dedicated to a specific paper where you will evaluate and write about their approach, findings, as well as what information needs more clarification. This will teach how to proficiently read primary literature and communicate to a general public audience by writing summaries.
Biology, Neuroscience
Predicting protein-based drugs efficacy on treating lung/breast cancer.
In recent years, there has been an explosion in the development of protein-based drugs. Many of these drugs have been designed to target cancer cells by inhibiting proteins necessary for cancer cells to proliferate. While current protein-based drugs for cancer has significantly improved patient's prognosis, these drugs remain challenging to design. Over the last few years, publicly available data on drug efficacy on several different targets has been accumulating. Using this data, one could analyze patterns that make certain drugs more effective than other drugs and even predict drug efficacy based on structural and chemical properties of these drugs.
Biology, Cancer, Engineering, AI/ML
Sleep medication: A bottle of lies or a bottle of dreams
There are many drug and other substances (such as melatonin) that are prescribed to people that have issues going or staying asleep. However many of these medications have mixed efficacy and it is unknown exactly what they do. These types of projects could revolve around investigating a currently known drug/ substance (such as ambien or melatonin). We can research how the drug effects the brain (if it is known), how effective the drugs are, how the drugs should be taken for maximum effect, and other details of the drug. We could also investigate potential future sleep therapies (an example could be endocannabinoids) that could be ground breaking or have better results than the current sleep drug market. We could also develop a survey to determine how any or many of these drugs are helping people sleep.
Biotech, Biology, Neuroscience, Chemistry
What makes the clock tick?
What are circadian clocks, who has them, and how do they work? We will come up with experiments to figure our how we can alter the circadian clock responses in the organisms around us.
Biology
Thinking Outside the Box to Treat Cancer
There are so many ways now to treat cancer, but not all of them work, making there a constant need to develop new cancer therapies. In this project, students will have the ability to look for a new drug target and work through the entire process from identification of drug target, solving the structure of the drug with its target, and developing experiments to learn how this drug works at a mechanistic level. Students will have the chance to write a paper detailing their new discovery.
Biology, Cancer, Chemistry
Chemical X: Creating the Next Great American Snack Food
Conceive, develop, and go-to-market with a scalable consumer packaged good product. The project will involve culinary ideation and R&D as well as detailed work-planning and execution on product iteration and design. Project will result in a product launch and potential to extend into sales tracking and growth strategy.
Biology, Literature, Business
Finding the Optimal Study Method
There is no shortage of suggestions found from a variety of sources on the best way to study for an important test. Are flash cards the best way to memorize things? What about writing a song with lyrics based on the test subject? How about teaching a friend or family member? Using research design and computer science skills we can find the answer to which study method is best within a particular school/community. Some important questions to think about include: -What kind of test would we use to measure study effectiveness? Would it be memorization or analysis based, or both? -How would we set up the experiment and control our variables to best ensure that the results come only as a result of the students' method of study? -How would we represent our data and perform the necessary statistical tests in a programming environment?
Biology, Computer Science
Synthesis and biological evaluation of novel pyrazolo[1,5-a]pyrimidines: Discovery of a selective inhibitor of JAK1 JH2 pseudokinase and VPS34
A series of novel 3,6-di-substituted or 3-substituted pyrazolo[1,5-a]pyrimidines were prepared via a microwave-assisted approach that generated a broad array of derivatives in good yields (20–93%, ave. = 59%). The straightforward synthesis involved sequential treatment of commercially-available acetonitrile derivatives. Importantly, a simple yet novel compound was equipotent with the more synthetically challenging 3,6-disubstituted derivatives and exhibited a promising and unique selectivity profile when screened against a panel consisting of 403 protein kinases.
Biology, Cancer, Chemistry
Virus hunter
It is now easier and cheaper than ever to determine sequences of DNA and RNA from any organism on the planet. Each day, scientists upload raw sequencing data from their experiments into publicly available databases for anyone in the world to analyze. Most of these sequence datasets are collected from whole organisms (bacterial colonies, insects, entire plants, etc.), tissues or organs (tumor samples, blood, cell culture, etc.), or environmental samples (soil, ocean water, etc.). Unknowingly, many of these sequence datasets also contain hidden genome sequences for previously undiscovered viruses or other pathogens. In this project, students will utilize publicly available next generation sequencing databases (e.g., National Center for Biotechnology Information, NCBI) to mine for new viruses. Students will investigate the literature to identify DNA or RNA sequencing datasets of interest. In parallel, students will also highlight a particular virus or family of viruses to use as a starting point for their searches. Students will learn how to use existing viral genomes to probe online databases to search for new viral sequences, and how to operate web-based computational tools to reassemble virus genomes from the raw sequence data. Students will learn about the biology of their virus of interest and develop hypotheses about the origins of the identified sequences. The project will conclude with a written report of the identified viral sequence(s) and may be suitable for publication in an academic journal for viral genome resources (e.g., Archives of Virology, Virus Genes, Microbiology Resource Announcements).
Biology
Exploring the Axon Initial Segment in Brain Disorders
Neurons are brain cells that have three main parts, the somatodendritic compartment, the axon initial segment, and the axon-axon terminal. The axon initial segment is instrumental for the neuronal function. However recent evidence suggests that the axon initial segment is disrupted in brain disorders like epilepsy, schizophrenia, bipolar, Autism spectrum disorders, multiple sclerosis, and neurodegenerative diseases.
Biology, Neuroscience
Literature Review
There is so much scientific literature out there ready to be synthesized! This is an excellent project option for students who are ready to pursue a (marine biology) research project of their own but do not live near the ocean. I am open to working with students who want to research any topic under the marine biology/ecology umbrella. Students might choose to learn about whale fall ecosystems, MPA regulation efficacy, aquaculture policies, larval dynamics, octopus camouflage, sharks' role in food webs, or something completely different! Students will write a scientific research paper detailing their findings, gaining critical professional scientific communication skills. They will also learn how to synthesize information from scientific articles while exploring a subject that interests them.
Biology, Environmental Science
Investigating the Utility of Machine Learning in Diagnostic Radiology
Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming increasingly utilized in the field of diagnostic radiology. In this project you would conduct a literature review investigating the machine learning methods that have been developed to aid radiologists in the detection of various anatomical and pathological features in X-rays, MRIs, ultrasound, and CT scans. You would then write a review paper providing a brief history of AI in radiology, summarizing new developments in the field, and describing specific challenges current researchers are facing.
Biology, Neuroscience, Medicine
