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Our next winter deadline is December 15, 2023 11:59pm PT. Apply today to lock in your spot!

10-session deep dive into a research topic of your choice

6-week research project with an expert and peers who share your passion

A career discovery experience with 3 expert mentors in your chosen fields

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Naina will conduct research on aposematic coloration, specifically as it relates to the poison dart frog (Phyllobates), and the ecological and evolutionary implications for other groups that exhibit unique coloration. Naina will conduct a literature review of papers involving poison dart frogs. Juan will provide background information and guidance as Naina explores topics that are important to the subjects of evolution and ecology, such as speciation, predator-prey relationships, and more. Juan will also share guidance relating to writing for a scientific journal, giving Naina an opportunity to apply skills in writing during her research.

Ornithology, evolution, ecology, biology, physiology, climate change

Evolution of poison dart frogs (Phyllobates) and implications of aposematic coloration in other organisms.

This study investigates the changing nature of marketing, especially by the makeup industry, as Generation Z increasingly employs its growing purchasing power. What do attraction and retention marketing tactics look like as brands seek to win Generation Z consumers? The research investigated the significance of Generation Z’s purchasing power, and found that younger consumers value personal connections, authenticity, and engaging with brands over digital platforms. Specifically in the makeup industry, social media, beauty influencer partnerships, and storytelling are employed to attract Generation Z. Brand communities, satisfying consumers, and loyalty programs are used to retain the younger consumers. A case study of the makeup brand Glossier illustrates how a digitally native brand uses digital tactics to win over the tech-savvy generation.

Brand marketing, digital marketing, project management, environmental sustainability

Digital Marketing in the Makeup Industry - Attraction and Retention of Generation Z

This research paper discusses certain environmental factors-heat, sleep, stress, and alcohol- that may target and affect those with Type One Diabetes. It was found that biochemically, ethanol is most strongly seen to accompany hypoglycemia from induced GI and hepatic absorption. In addition, due to one's poor cognitive state, they aren't able to properly handle their diabetic responsibilities, leading to hazardous results; Inconsistent sleep leads to poor adherence to treatment and glycemic management. When the recommended hours of sleep are not met, poor glycemic control and unregulated blood glucose come to follow-with a higher HbA1c. In addition hypoglycemia during the night is noticed. The neurological impacts that also come with poor sleep also seem to relay inefficient adherence to treatment; Those with T1D are more sensitive to heat due to damaged thermoregulatory control, sweat glands, and lower blood flow. In addition, heat increases the risk of hyperglycemia due to the possible spike in insulin; With increased levels of stress due to a release of cortisol and epinephrine-comes with heightened glucose concentrations and association with insulin resistance; and finally, instability in one´s mental health. Ways to address these effects and take control include limiting alcohol intake, staying hydrated-especially in the presence of heat, eating proper meals throughout the day, and getting sufficient amounts of sleep (Recommended 9-12 hours(ages 13-18); 7 hours(18+)), taking steps toward limiting stress, eating a 15g carbohydrate snack before bed, showing up regularly to doctor appointments, taking insulin prior to every meal.

Anesthesia

Type One Diabetes Management

Ece has identified a public dataset that contains information about anonymized credit card transactions and whether they were fraudulent or not. The goal of this project is to build a machine learning model that can accurately predict whether or not a credit card transaction is fraudulent based on data like that found in this dataset. She is learning many of the basics of machine learning which include importing and cleaning data, correcting class imbalance and skewed variables, implementing cross-validation, and iterating through different models to find an optimal balance in the bias vs. variance tradeoff. She hopes to be able to take her findings and build it into a simplified web app using StreamLit within Python..

Analytics, Data Science, AI, Machine Learning, Economics, Econometrics, Business, Statistical Programming, Geospatial Analytics

Predicting fraudulent credit card transactions

The tumor-suppressor protein, p53, receives a multitude of inputs like DNA damage and growth signals to cause downstream effects like apoptosis, DNA repair, and inhibition of angiogenesis.   Precise regulations are highly important to maintain regular healthy cells. In this paper, we will be looking at one of those regulation strategies: Mdm2 and the ubiquitin-mediated degradation of p53. When the balance of the Mdm2 and p53 is dysregulated, cancer is a common outcome.  Mdm2 and p53 complex, when the balance is dysregulated, cancer is a very likely outcome. In this review, we will explore the mechanism of how this balance gets dysregulated through mutations and cellular stress. We will also highlight the types of cancer where Mdm2 and p53 dysregulation is common and current therapies that address this mechanism. 


How to develop novel therapeutics for diseases; Molecular mechanisms behind diseases and cellular processes

The dysregulation of Mdm2-mediated degradation of p53 causes cancer


This project will study genetic mutations in humans that grant resistance against pathogens. It will describe the characteristics of these genetic traits, which pathogens they grant resistance to, and the mechanism by which these traits provide resistance. It will also discuss the detrimental aspects of these traits, if any, and the potential applications of the genetic resistance mechanisms. Based on these criteria, the following traits will be discussed within the project: sickle cell hemoglobin and malaria resistance, CCR5(delta)32 and HIV resistance, and duffy antigen absence and malaria resistance. This project will be given in the form of a research review paper.


Cell signaling, cancer biology, mathematical modeling of biochemical networks, cancer immunotherapy

Genetic mutations in humans conferring resistance to pathogens

While the understanding of life has rapidly advanced, we still have diseases for which there is no cure. Degenerative nerve diseases affect many of your body’s activities such as movement, talking, and more. While most have no cure, treatments may help improve symptoms, relieve pain, and increase mobility. Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is a common cause of dementia among the elderly. Dementia is the loss of cognitive functioning and behavioral abilities, interfering with a person’s daily life. Currently, many symptomatic treatments including cholinesterase inhibitors, NMDA (N-methyl-D-aspartate) antagonists, and immunotherapies have been approved for the treatment of AD. People with AD have reduced cerebral content of choline acetyltransferase, causing a decrease in acetylcholine synthesis and impaired cortical cholinergic function. The cholinesterase inhibitor inhibits the degradation of acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter that is important for cognitive function and which is reduced in AD; thus inhibiting cholinesterase inhibitors allows the presence of more acetylcholine. NMDA antagonists are competitive molecules that block the NMDA glutamate receptors to normalize the glutamatergic system by blocking glutamate action, thereby improving the cognitive and memory deficits. In recent years, there has been development of several potential disease-modifying approaches based on immunotherapy. One of the most significant approaches is the removal of brain amyloid-β peptide (Aβ) using anti-Aβ antibodies. By using these monoclonal antibodies, immune cells of the body can clear away Aβ plaques and improve cognitive deficits. These treatments are currently symptomatic, but future research is being conducted on potential disease-modifying and disease preventing treatments.

Medicine, Neuroscience, Drugs & Pharmacology, Chronic Pain, Cellular Molecular Biology

Current and Forthcoming Treatments for Alzheimer’s Disease

Music is used widely in modern mainstream multimedia, such as in film and advertisements, to influence an individual’s emotions. This paper will use previous research to compare and contrast how music in different contexts affects the perceiver’s emotions. Music is used in film music in order to elicit emotion in accordance with the scene, whereas music in advertising stimulates the listener and entices them into buying the product. Further research can explore how music can be used as a mood regulative tool in different contexts, such as music therapy or social media.

Music Theory; Music Cognition; Music Psychology; Linguistics; Media Studies

How does film music influence a perceiver’s emotions differently than advertising music?

Context: 1 in 10 autistic people have some form of savant syndrome. There is no definitive explanation for why it occurs because there are many different skills and types of savants.
Methods/Approach:In this paper I will analyze current research and determine which theory is the most stable across all the differences between savants.
Results:
Conclusions:


Clinical Psychology, Community Psychology, Mental Health, Adolescence, Culture, Parent-child relationships, Coparenting relationships, Minority mental health, Racial disparities, Public policy, Nonprofits

What causes savant syndrome for autistic people and what is the least nuanced theory?


World leaders across the globe are looking into the factors that determine the happiness of their citizens, something incredibly important but often overlooked today. However, pinpointing the best one is difficult because there are a multitude of potentially relevant factors and a limited resource pool with which to maximize each. Trying to decipher which traits decide happiness becomes troublesome under the sheer magnitude of available data. The World Happiness Report is a global attempt moderated by a team of experts to rank and score every country based on the happiness of their citizens, released yearly under the World Happiness Report. We propose several regression-based models to predict the scoring of a country based on a multitude of factors generally considered whenever a country is scored on the WHI. Some of these factors include the economic state, health and life expectancy, and education. Political leaders could employ our model to get a better idea of what attributes create the most impact on a countries’ scoring or an average citizen could use the model to understand what their country is doing well in and on what their country could improve. The benefits of increasing the happiness of any countries’ citizens are plenty, such as increased productivity (increasing economic prowess,) less crime, and astronomically lower healthcare costs/suicide rates/drug overdoses.

Data Science, Machine Learning, Data Engineering, Analytics, Electroencephalography (neuroscience)

Predicting the Happiness of a Nation: An Explanation on the Factors of Country Morale

Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is the most common endocrine disorder in women, affecting up to 15% of women in the reproductive age. PCOS is a heterogeneous disease that is characterized by polycystic ovaries, irregular menses, and hyperandrogenism. It is highly associated with gynecologic, metabolic, and endocrine dysfunction. This dysfunction often leads to clinical manifestations of hirsutism, infertility, and insulin resistance. Additionally, studies done have shown that PCOS can be linked to serious psychiatric disorders. The prevalence of anxiety and depression are significantly higher in females with PCOS as compared to females without PCOS. This could be due to many biological factors that are connected to the pathogenesis of the disease and its comorbidities. Many papers discuss the varying causes of the connection between PCOS and psychiatric disorders. Certain hypothesized causes such as the overactive hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA axis) found in PCOS could be linked to an altered hormone profile that manifests as anxiety and depression. The HPA axis is crucial in regulating GnRH release, which is closely linked in neurotransmitter processes. Neurotransmitter alterations could also be a prominent cause of GnRH dysregulation, leading to PCOS as well as psychiatric manifestations. Neurotransmitters such as gamma aminobutyric acid (GABA), serotonin, and kisspeptin, when dysregulated, all affect the prevalence of psychiatric disease, and are often abnormal in patients with PCOS. Others speculate the connection between these neurotransmitters and the gut-brain axis contributes to the severity and frequency of psychiatric disorders in PCOS. Dietary supplements such as vitamin D and selenium have shown to improve neurotransmitter levels as well as significantly reduce the effects of mental distress and manifestations of PCOS symptoms. This approach introduces the possibility of gut nutrient deficiencies in PCOS causing psychiatric disorders. In this article we review the relevant scientific data and its association with the prevalence of psychiatric disorders in PCOS. Articles found from PubMed and Google Scholar were used as evidence to help us gather more than 30 scientific articles relevant to the topic of this paper. Each article was carefully read and analyzed in order to provide insight to the connection between PCOS and psychiatric disorders. The goal of this review is to compile and contextualize the biological abnormalities that are the possible causes of a high prevalence of psychiatric disorders in PCOS patients.

Gene therapy, Organ-on-chip, regenerative medicine, precision medicine, molecular biology, immunology, microbiology, biomaterials, tissue engineering

What is the biological basis (the altered hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal and gut-brain axes) in PCOS that causes an increased prevalence in development of psychiatric disorders?

Isabella would like to write a review paper on the individual psychological differences that influence high school athlete sport performance. She would like to compare and contrast different sport environments (team or individual sport) as well. We'll focus on different psychological factors that might influence sport success, including conscientiousness, extroversion, intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and self-efficacy. Lastly, she will talk about how we can apply this information to help athletes and coaches in the future. 


kinesiology, exercise psychology, exercise cognition, exercise physiology, motor behavior

Individual psychological differences that influence high school athlete sport performance

How Dance is coded in the brain? Which are the mechanisms at the base of it? How the emotions feeled during dancing are encoded in our brain circuitry? The brain does not only regulate and control the motor activity during dancing, but it found its roots into something deeper, it encode the emotions that each of us feel and express while dancing. This project aims to unrevel the relation between brains and emotions during the dancing process.

Biology, Neuroscience, Epigenetics

The brain's dance: neurobiological implication of the brain during Odissi Dance

Pulsars are a unique type of neutron star that emit pulses of radio emission in beams that can often be detected from Earth. As pulsars rapidly spin, the beams sweep across the earth, which allows for the detection of their periodic, repetitive pulses. Pulsars are extremely useful in the study of extreme states of matter and exoplanets, and are useful tools in measuring cosmic distances and searching for gravitational waves. Traditionally, pulsar candidates have been identified through manual signal processing. As data volumes increase, automated methods, such as artificial neural networks and other machine learning tools, have recently been proposed. In our project, we used another machine learning tool, the random forest classifier--an algorithm that takes the majority output of multiple decision trees--to accurately separate real pulsar candidates from radio frequency interference (RFI) and other noise. Once identified, these candidates can be further studied and possibly allotted telescope time to confirm them as pulsars. In developing our tool, we used the HTRU2 dataset from the UCI Machine Learning Repository, which contained 1,639 real pulsar examples and 16,259 samples of RFI/noise. Features of the data we used included the mean, standard deviation, excess kurtosis, and skewness of the integrated pulse profile and DM-SNR curve. Our model demonstrated a 98% accuracy in identifying pulsars. Our results indicated that the excess kurtosis, skewness, and mean of integrated profile respectively were the most important factors in differentiating between real pulsars and interference. This tool could be used to process data from future surveys to narrow down the candidates that need to be directly processed by humans, for example data from future pulsar surveys conducted by the Square kilometer Array (SKA).

Physics, Astrophysics, Cosmology, Math, Computer Science, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence

How can a random forest classifier be used to identify pulsar candidates?



Myopia is recognized as a "major twenty-first-century public health problem," projected to affect 50% of the world's population by 2050." (Wang et al., 2020). High myopia is associated with a higher risk of sight-threatening diseases such as glaucoma and retinal detachment. It is a condition that has been increasing worldwide, especially in East Asia, where myopia rates are greater than 80% in middle and high school students (Wang et al., 2020). Myopia is more widespread in the younger generations living in urbanized Asian societies than in their Western counterparts, suggesting that the "epidemic of myopia in Asia" may be a "recent generational phenomenon" (Saw et al., 2014). This literature review summarizes pre-existing data and studies examining the prevalence of myopia and factors contributing to myopia progression in China, Japan, and India—among the countries most widely affected. As factors such as genetics, education, and diet vary between cities, regions, and countries, analyzing these variations can provide insight into strategies to prevent the growth of myopia and provide eye care accessibility to children at risk of myopia.

Biochemistry, Math, Chemistry, Optics

A Comparative Study of the Prevalence of Myopia and the Use of Overnight Orthokeratology and Low-dose Atropine for Children in East Asia and India

AI systems are becoming increasingly prominent and ubiquitous in our daily lives. For example, one can find AI systems in social media and in large language models (ex. ChatGPT) used to predict user behavior and text input. While these AI systems can be useful, they still have problems aligning with our human values. This paper will conduct a systematic review of ethical AI design methods, and discuss instances where these design methods assisted AI in aligning with human values. Then we will discuss how AI developing human consciousness may change the implementation of these design methods. This paper provides a potential way to think about how to manage AI in the case it develops human consciousness.

human-computer interaction, social media, tech ethics, AI ethics, privacy, UX design, computer science, social psychology, cognitive psychology

How can we ensure that AI systems are aligned with human values and ethical principles?

A short science fiction story addressing the complexity of human nature, quest for immortality, nuances of addiction, and political propaganda. Plight of the Eggs asks readers to decide for themselves what it means to be human in an increasingly divided world.

Classics, Ancient Greek, Women in Antiquity, Greco-Roman Mythology, Magic and Witchcraft in Antiquity

Plight of the Eggs

This project is focused on the Scientific Theory of Invisibility Cloaking. Invisibility Cloaking is based on the principles of Optics, a field in Physics that studies light and its physical properties. This project helps you understand the use of transformation optics and metamaterials to create optical devices for hiding objects and making them invisible. You must guide light rays around an object to make it invisible to the naked eye. In explaining the Theory of Invisibility Cloaking, I have also explained the refractive property of light, Snell’s Law, Fermat’s Principle, Maxwell's equations, and cloaking devices.

Quantum Optics, Quantum Computing, Electromagnetic Cloaking

Scientific Theory of Invisibility Cloaking

Krrishika is working on a research paper about Alzheimer's disease (AD). In this research paper, she is interested in discussing the following key points: the prevalence of AD among certain populations, co-morbidities that contribute to AD, potential treatments for AD and challenges associated with curing AD. For the first main point, discussing the prevalence of AD, she plans to write about the genetic risk factors underlying AD and exploring how there are sex-differences and ethnicity differences associated in developing AD. For the second main point, discussing co-morbidies that can contribute to AD, she plans to write about the genetic risk factors contribute to disruption of certain biological processes which can contribute to developing AD and exploring the sex-differences and ethnicity differences of certain co-morbidies associated with AD. In the third main point, she plans to discuss current therapetutics approaches used to treat AD, the challenges and limitations for developing effective therapeutics, future treatment approaches being developed.

Neuroscience, Genetics, Genomics, Epigenetics, Biochemistry, Genomics, Cancer biology

Understanding the prevalence of Alzhiemer's Disease and challenges associated with therapeutic treatments

This paper discusses the role of LDL cholesterol in the pathogenesis of aortic valve stenosis at the cellular level. It is focused on the role of reactive oxygen species and the oxidative stress they may cause on this pathway. The final objective is to elucidate this pathway in order to provide targets for preventative or therapeutic care. I have gone through multiple databases of scientific papers and has gathered over 30 papers to use for this literature review.

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