Earth and Environmental Sciences
Fertilizer runoff is a biohazard that impacts many freshwater ecosystems and has become increasingly detrimental in recent years. Lakes have experienced high rates of eutrophication resultin…
Animal Sciences
Fall armyworms(FAW) cause around 500 million dollars in economic damage each year in the U.S., and pesticidal treatments are becoming increasingly ineffective. Meanwhile, management solution…
Obesity and diabetes are life-debilitating health conditions that may lead to life-long health complications. Energy homeostasis is tightly regulated, helping maintain food satiation and sat…
In an increasingly tumultuous and tense political and racial climate, there is new information in the concept of racial trauma. Racial trauma is a direct effect of personal experience or exp…
Plant Sciences
This project’s purpose was to measure how much the addition of compost in soil would affect the growth of Capsicum annuum. Compost boosts plant growth by adding vital nutrients to soil. Comp…
Translational Medical Science
Aging is a process involving dynamic changes to the living body over time. From a biological standpoint, it relies on various molecular and cellular factors typically dependent on the enviro…
Behavioral and Social Sciences
Confirmation bias is a subconscious bias in which people selectively search for, interpret, and remember information in a way that confirms their pre-existing beliefs. The purpose of my rese…
Biomedical and Health Sciences
Cord blood (CB) hematopoietic stem cells (HSC) are the most promising source for therapy purposes. Such cells are highly proliferative, have low immune reactivity and a lower risk of graft-v…
Biochemistry
Enzymes, known informally as the workhorses of the cell, are proteins that quicken chemical reactions. Traditional research on improving enzyme efficiency focuses on the active site or bindi…
Earth and Environmental Sciences
First Award
Sedimentary rock layers found in eastern Pennsylvania, including Berks County, are known to have uranium deposits. Radon-222 is a naturally occurring radioactive gas that is a daughter eleme…
Physics and Astronomy
Fourth Award
Despite their discovery now dating over 50 years ago, and the great deal of observations we have collected in that time, there is still little we understand about the causes of a pulsar’s gr…
With the rapid rise of antibiotic resistance in bacteria, the fundamental need for new antimicrobial therapeutics is a pressing concern. In order to have an adequate arsenal to target antibi…
Mathematics
Collatz Conjecture was created in the 1930s by Lothar Collatz and has perplexed mathematicians for almost a century. The Collatz problem is an iteration of n/2, when n is even, and 3x+1, whe…
Engineering Technology: Statics & Dynamics
First Award
In the diverse landscape of robotic applications, there has been limited research on robots capable of navigating under stick structures, despite their critical importance in high-risk envir…
Plant Sciences
Peanuts are an important oil and food crop. The calcium essential to pod growth and peanut productivity is obtained mainly via roots, so root growth is of key importance. Research has shown…
Biomedical Engineering
The growing demand for patient organs has revealed 3D bio-printing as a potential solution for the global organ shortage. However, a deeper fundamental understanding of vascularization is re…
Physics and Astronomy
Trans Neptunian Objects (TNOs) are objects at least 30 astronomical units (AU) away from the Sun. The distance and primitivity of TNOs allow them to preserve data from the infant solar syste…
Mathematics
Systems of polynomial equations are of fundamental importance to mathematics, and have been applied to numerous areas, including physical problems, chemical reactions, robotics, communicatio…
Behavioral and Social Sciences
Violence in academic institutions has been notably increasing in the United States. School shootings and violence are at an all-time high, and so are suicide rates. The purpose of this exper…
Plant Sciences
There is growing interest in the Cannabacaea family for therapeutic and clinical use. Best known for hemp and marijuana (Cannabis sativa), this family also includes the Humulus lupulus (comm…
Mathematics
Distance-based indices on graphs are of interest to chemical graph theorists for their connections to the chemical properties of molecules. In this paper, I study several extremal properties…
Computational Biology and Bioinformatics
Eye diseases can potentially cause blindness in patients. Cataracts are the leading cause of blindness, accounting for over 51% of blindness worldwide. Glaucoma and diabetic retinopathy foll…
Systems Software
Third Award
Glaucoma is a collection of progressive optic neuropathies impacting the optic nerve head. As the world's leading cause of irreversible blindness, timely diagnosis of this asymptomatic disea…
Biomedical Engineering
Third Award
Myopia is the most common eyesight problem faced by most students. India has more than 10 million cases yearly, affecting almost 30-40% of the population. It is expected that by 2050 it will…
Biomedical Engineering
Metastatic (migratory) cancer accounts for 90% of cancer deaths, yet not much is known about the specific factors driving tumor migration, including interstitial flow. In order to characteri…
Chemistry
Microplastics, plastic particles <5mm, are toxic in waterways due to their role as a transporter for harmful microbes and other substances. In previous works, research was developed by creat…
Cellular and Molecular Biology
Fourth Award
The pandemic-induced decline in colonoscopies and the continuing rise of colorectal cancer (CRC) rates in younger populations makes the need for early CRC indicators higher than ever. The ro…
Behavioral and Social Sciences
Electric vehicles (EVs) are growing exponentially in global sales and have become one major mode of urban mobility, but still face range anxiety due to insufficient charging infrastructure.…
Energy: Sustainable Materials and Design
In today's society, saving energy is a top priority. Why use harmful greenhouse gases that contaminate our atmosphere when clean energy is right at our fingertips? We just need to find a way…
Embedded Systems
Homeowners around the world face the challenge of birds attempting to nest on their balconies, despite the availability of many products on the market designed to deter birds. These birds ha…