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Our next fall deadline is October 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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Hereditary non-polyposis colorectal cancer (HNPCC) is an inherited disorder characterized by an increased risk of developing colorectal cancer before age 50. HNPCC is predominantly caused by genetic mutations in MLH1 and MSH2, which are involved in DNA mismatch repair. Current standard practice is to perform prophylactic colectomy, resulting in debilitating aftereffects for life. Though the genetic cause of HNPCC is well-known, there are currently no available treatments that target these mutations. Herein we describe a novel theoretical approach using a CRISPR-Cas9n-based genetic therapy to restore DNA mismatch repair. First, gRNA and template DNA targeting the most prevalent mutation clusters in MLH1 and MSH2 as well as CRISPR-Cas9n elements will be packaged into an integrase-deficient lentiviral vector. Then, the viral vector will be used to transduce human colonic tumor-derived organoids as well as administered systemically in mouse models of HNPCC. Mice will be monitored clinically and for signs of disease progression. At termination, colonic tissue will be harvested and analyzed for restoration of the wild-type MLH1 and MSH2 sequence and biochemical markers of HNPCC. This proof-of-concept may potentially offer an alternative strategy using CRISPR-Cas9n-based gene therapy to prevent tumor formation in patients, avoid morbid surgery, and significantly improve quality of life.

Cardiovascular biology, immunology, cell and molecular biology, cancer biology, epigenetics, cancer, clinical medicine, public health, epidemiology

A theoretical gene therapy for hereditary nonpolyposis colorectal cancer using CRISPR-Cas9 nickase

This project will seek to address explanations of dark matter - what it’s made of, and what it does in the universe. We’ll spend time addressing evidence for dark matter, theories of what dark matter could be, and finish the project by writing a review paper on what’s been learned.

Particle physics, high-energy physics, detector physics, neutrinos

Dark Matter Research Paper

Neglected tropical diseases, otherwise known as NTDs, are native to parts of Asia & Africa. They run rampant in developing countries and affect the lives of many people negatively despite the availability of resources to prevent their spread. While NTDs are allocated some funding, there are ultimately not enough resources given to neglected tropical diseases by world health agendas to completely eradicate them. In order to illustrate the prominence of neglected diseases and the urgency needed to treat them, we will create a database and corresponding dashboard. The data for this dashboard will come from recorded cases of specific neglected tropical diseases in Africa. The neglected tropical diseases considered will be river blindness, malaria, leishmaniasis, African sleeping sickness, and trachoma. But ultimately, only three of these diseases will be chosen depending on data availability. In addition to recorded cases of these diseases, information about the environmental conditions, such as temperature ranges and humidity levels, where vectors to neglected tropical diseases thrive will also be given. The database will allow searching among multiple neglected diseases by specific conditions such as geography or the vector of the disease. Meanwhile, the dashboard will show a geographic mapping of the disease’s hotspots and locations with similar geography, as well as a line graph of the number of cases over time. Through this, we expect that the prominence of neglected diseases will be highlighted, along with the need to take action to prevent their spread. Neglected tropical diseases are a huge problem, but with increased urgency to treat them, their spread can be contained.

Infectious Diseases, Data Science, Data Visualization

In what temperature ranges and humidity levels of water do vectors for neglected diseases thrive?

Currently, hundreds of thousands of girls across India are impacted by period poverty, being defined as the inability to access safe, hygienic menstrual products to use every month. As a result of this inability, girls and women are often subject to using unsafe products and methods to control their bleeding, using old rags, sawdust, or even cow dung. Though these items pose physical detriments to the people that use them, they also can cause and/or inflate mental health issues. For one, anxiety and depression seems to be associated to the lack of available menstrual products across India. The embarrassment and stigma that plagues the country also takes a toll on the girls' school attendance and sexual health, as several have had to resort to transactional sex in order to have access to safe menstrual products. Luckily, however, there are companies and actions being taken to help prevent these challenges Indian women face, physically as well as mentally. For one, and increased availability to WASH systems across the country allows for the impacted women to change and clean themselves within safe and dignified quarters. Moreover, the availability of new, cheap, and reusable banana-fiber pads serve as a way for ladies to make their own menstrual products for cheap. Lastly, the distribution of more reusable pads across the country paired with a preliminary education, instructing the women how to properly clean and prepare the pads, also seem to serve as a stepping stone to the cause of mitigating the effects of period poverty.

Public Health

The Mental and Physical Impacts of Period Poverty in India

Teen anxiety and depression continues to rise despite more emphasis on mental health awareness than ever. One of the issues that is prevalent for psychology is the variability between individual response on traditional mental illness tests. Having a quantitative test will provide an additional data point to help better reduce variability in qualitative response and ensure that teens who need assistance will get assistance.

This project is designed to see if there are data trends that indicate an association between catecholamine levels and social phobia scores. 



Toxicology, Endocrinology, Microscopy, Food Science,

Catecholamines and Social Phobia

The idea is to develop a project that would recognise human emotion and recommend a song based on it. The implementation of this idea would involve a single machine learning model - a human emotion recognition model. This model would recognise and determine the user’s emotion in real-time through sentimental analysis. Following which, a supporting code would use this recognised emotion to recommend a song for the user to listen to. These song recommendations, however, would be limited to the songs present in the dataset being used - meaning the recommendations would be the same everytime the model is run.

Business, Econ, App development, Web Development, AI/ML Algorithm development, other Computer Science areas, High School subjects

Human Emotion Recognition to Recommend Songs

For my Polygence final project, I will be creating and submitting a literature review regarding the adolescent brain and its relation to mental health and cannabis use. Mental health has become a crisis in the adolescent population.  With the onset of COVID-19, this problem has only increased as the number of mental health disorder diagnoses has increased across the nation.  Parallel to the rise in deteriorating adolescent mental health is the frequency of cannabis usage.  Commonly used for the temporary euphoric high it produces due to the presence of tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), cannabis is often used to supposedly alleviate the stresses that stem from mental health disorders.  Contrary to common thought, cannabis use actually worsens pre-existing mental health conditions and can be a contributing factor to other ailments later in life. Whether it be social or general anxiety disorder, depression, or bipolar disorder, marijuana only seems to worsen the symptoms of these diagnoses. Therefore, it is important to understand its impact, especially since both substance abuse and the mental health crisis are problems that increasingly permeate the adolescent population.  In this literature review, we will discuss the evolution and correlation between adolescent marijuana use and mental health and how, together, they affect the developing brain. This paper will also explore how stress-inducing factors, like COVID-19, have only worsened the preexisting problem. This paper also discusses possible promising pharmaceutical solutions to this ongoing problem.  Education and awareness surrounding mental health and cannabis use are lacking in the adolescent population, and this literature review hopes to give a simple, yet thorough overview of the current literature related to these topics.

Neuroscience, Mental Health, Science Communication, Science Policy

Cannabis and the Adolescent Brain

One of the non-verbal communication techniques utilised in sign language is the hand gesture. It is mostly used by deaf and dumb individuals to communicate with other people or among themselves when they have hearing or speech issues. Many makers around the world have created various sign language systems, but they are neither flexible nor cost-effective for end users. Therefore, my goal in this project is to create software that can automatically identify sign language, enabling deaf and dumb people to interact with hearing people or normal people more successfully. The two emerging topics of study are pattern recognition and gesture recognition. Hand gestures play a crucial role in nonverbal communication and are essential to daily living. Computer recognition of sign language deals with translating real-life Indian sign language symbols to text in either English or Hindi. Sign gestures can be classified as static and dynamic. However static gesture recognition is simpler than dynamic gesture recognition, as it requires analysing a picture instead of a video, which is just a collection of multiple pictures. In this research, I will be working on how to best build my AI model, by working on the pre-processing and data augmentation, in order to have the most accurate data model, which can work on general data. I will also work on deciding which layers to use for my AI model in addition to the CNN to increase its accuracy. As the final deliverable, I hope to build a website where this model can be used by people to translate ISL pictures to text easily.

AI/ML, Programming, Career Guidance, Computer Science, Software Eng, AppDev

How can we accurately translate real-life Indian Sign language to text and text to Indian Sign Language?

Whitney is interested in exploring how communication styles of certain workplaces are more or less effective for younger generations, and understand how younger generations can be prepared for workplace communication with older generations. To do so, she will conduct qualitative surveys across small businesses in her town — asking both their employees and the managers on their perspectives of their current communication platforms, styles, and relationships across generations.

Digital Marketing, Marketing Automation, Branding, Copywriting, Demand Generation, B2B SAAS, Organizational Leadership

Effective leadership and communication in the workplace with Gen Z & Gen Alpha

GLUE (Wang et al., 2019) is a set of popular language tasks in Natural Language Processing. However, models trained on GLUE tasks often outperform humans, showing clear training error. Thus, we seek a comparison of the most popular language models, which an be done with accuracy and model performance - i.e. what is it missing, what is it getting right, how does it relate to human performance.

Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, Speech Recognition, Computer Vision, Graph Theory

A Comparison of Language Model Performance vs. Human Performance on GLUE Tasks

Systemic juvenile idiopathic arthritis (sJIA) is a subtype of juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA) characterized by systemic inflammation of joints and sometimes organs. SJIA has no known cause, but there are known biomarkers, of which one is high concentrations of interleukin-18 (IL-18), a proinflammatory cytokine involved in regulating the transcription of other proinflammatory cytokines. In sJIA, the “free” concentration is elevated, especially in patients with a past history of macrophage activation syndrome (MAS), a condition sJIA patients are prone to in which there is an overproduction of T lymphocytes and corresponding overproduction of inflammatory cytokines. As a result, IL-18 receptor antagonism serves as a potential treatment for sJIA patients non-responsive to previous treatment and patients who have experienced MAS. In this project, potential inhibitors of IL-18Ra will be docked and optimized using Autodock Vina and Osprey 3.0, respectively. The results of the binding and optimizing will be compared and will aid in developing drug therapy for sJIA and MAS patients.

Case reports in medicine, computational protein design, cryo-EM image analysis, computational genomics, telemedicine, AI in medicine, biochemistry, web development, data journalism

Optimizing small-molecule inhibition of sJIA and MAS biomarker IL-18 receptor IL-18Ra via Autodock and Osprey 3.0

Due to deforestation, many trees that act as important carbon sinks are lost every year. With less carbon sinks, climate change occurs at a faster rate. By increasing the photosynthetic efficiency of plants, we can create larger carbon sinks with fewer plants and less land. Increasing the efficiency of non model plants remains challenging due to a lack of research. Here, we’ll discuss the possibilities of using data science and ML to help us model and improve the photosynthetic efficiency of plants. Specifically we’ll investigate metabolic modeling and the protein engineering of Rubisco.

Chemical engineering & data science applied to biology

Data Science for Improving the Photosynthetic Efficiency of Non-model Plants

I did a paper and a coding project!

Molecular Dynamics in Materials Science and Engineering and Nanotechnology Literature Review Paper:

Molecular dynamics (MD) is a computer simulation technique that helps to explore the behavior and properties of molecules and atoms. MD has been used in research and development in many spaces, including materials science and engineering and nanotechnology. MD has been proven useful in topics like the nano-engineering of construction materials, correcting graphene planar defects, studying self-assembling biomaterials, and the densification, consolidation, and sintering of copper nanomaterials.


Particle Simulations:

The purpose of my particle simulations is to illustrate a couple of phenomena in particle physics. In the respected field, a key challenge is the scale at which these phenomena occur. We cannot see particles with the human eye, so it defaults to a troublesome learning experience for others. Computer simulations in this field help provide insight into what happens in these phenomena. For this project, I made a simulation based on particle collisions and another simulation based on heat. Keep in mind that they may not be 100% accurate since they are supposed to be simplifications of the actual phenomenon, yet still mostly accurately depict it.

Biophysics, Robotics, Mechanical Engineering, Quantum Physics, General Physics, Physical computing

Computer Simulation Techniques: Molecular Dynamics and Particle Simulations

Traumatic exposure, specifically at a young age, is a very impactful issue and can affect an individual's adulthood. This is due to the brain still being in development, and chronic stress in an individual who's stress response system hasn't fully developed can be problematic to its natural development. Stress will be regulated by cortisol, which is a steroid hormone produced by the adrenal glands. When chronic stress is present, the system may adapt in different ways which can lead to increased or blunted cortisol levels in the long term. Here I explain our current knowledge of how traumatic exposure as a child may impact cortisol levels and how it varies based on the type of trauma. There are many mixed findings due to the stress response system adapting in different ways to different people's traumatic experiences. The results in many cortisol-testing studies may also be affected by experimental factors, the mental state of the subjects during the testing, or based on the method used to measure the cortisol level. As I stated earlier, the two most common patterns are increased and blunted cortisol levels. Some studies even suggest that there is no significant relation between childhood trauma and cortisol levels. When there is a relation, there has also been shown to be variation between the different types of traumas due to some types being more or less detrimental on the stress response system's functioning. In this review, I summarize and analyze many findings in order to determine childhood trauma's effects on cortisol levels based on our current knowledge, and how they may vary based on the type of trauma.

developmental psychology, child-related policy, social and neurobiological mechanisms

Literature Review: The Effect of Childhood Trauma on Cortisol Levels

Given the rise in multiple drug resistant bacterial infections, finding new methodologies to treat these infections is imperative. Bacteriophage (viruses that infect bacterial cells) were used as a treatment for bacterial infections prior to the advent and mass production of antibiotics, and are slowly making a comeback as a viable treatment option. However, there are several social problems that may impact the viability of bacteriophage therapy in the future including (but not limited to): communist origins, perception of viruses as a result of the COVID pandemic, spread of misinformation on the internet, trust between the public and scientists. This research project will aim to assess the public perception of phage therapy and develop an argument in response to hesitancy. 

Microbiology, immunology, immunotherapy development, genomics, phage therapy, genetics, metagenomics

Assessing public perceptions on bacteriophage therapy. 

As people age, their memory and proprioceptive ability generally deteriorate, especially in their later years of life. According to the American Psychological Association (APA), episodic and longer term memory typically decline as one ages (APA Office on Aging and Committee on Aging, Vierck, n.d.). The APA also lists exercise as a way to improve forgetfulness. Dance is a form of exercise, which can, on its own, enhance one’s memory, however, by learning combinations (sequences of dance steps) and working the brain, dance can further improve memory and limit forgetfulness. Additionally, according to a study published in the National Library of Medicine, dance improves static balance (Stawicki, Wareńczak, & Lisiński, 2021). The study I am conducting will test the effect of two months of dance on people of 60-80 years’ memory and proprioceptive ability. Participants in the study will be taught combinations in a dance class for the two months, and various tests will be performed over the span of the study, such as balance, limb control, and recall evaluations. These results over the months will be compared to the participants’ baseline in order to study the effects of dance. My hypothesis is that due to the dance training, the people’s scores on recall, limb control, and balance tests will improve. It is important to actively attempt to find solutions or ways to improve the memory and proprioceptive ability of elderly people, as these are problems they encounter frequently. Dance poses a cost-effective and potentially enjoyable solution to commonly experienced problems as people age.

Botany, ecology, developmental psychology, educational psychology, learning sciences

The effect of dance on the memory and proprioceptive ability of the elderly

For this project, Thomas is interested in testing airfoils with different shapes and validating their aerodynamic properties using CFD software. We researched open source tools to run the simulation and decided to use SimFlow along with OpenFOAM for this task. This will be used along with a dedicated airfoil feature within the CFD software. At the end of this project, he will have simulated results over a set of airfoil designs that can be used to explain the practical applications of each to particular use cases.

Computer science, scientific computing, high-performance computing, parallel computing, GPU computing, numerical analysis, linear algebra, differential equations, physics simulations

Meet Polygence Scholars and explore their projects