Biomedical and Health Sciences
First Award
After losing my grandfather to COPD, I was determined to develop an accessible method for diagnosis of chronic respiratory illnesses. The objective of my project was to design and create a h…
Plant Sciences
Fourth Award
The environmental and health hazards associated with the application of synthetic chemical inputs in agriculture increased the demand for technologies that not only allow higher crop product…
Translational Medical Science
Colorectal cancer (CRC) is not only one of the most common non-sex-specific cancers, but also one of the most deadly. Early diagnosis and treatment, however, can significantly improve patien…
Physics and Astronomy
By using orbital period, spectrophotometry, and bayesian inferential tests, we examined the orbital periods and photometry of one exoplanet in the HD star system: 189733 b. Through the const…
Biomedical Engineering
The scientist set out to further optimize on a previous Bessel Function approach to improving blood circulation using complex ultrasonic waveform. An algorithm and associated C code was deve…
Behavioral and Social Sciences
Third Award
In the past decade, the US government and other key interest groups have taken serious steps to address the addiction epidemic; however, despite these efforts, asper the data from the Nation…
Microbiology
The foundation of this 5-year study has matured from the growing threat of antibiotic resistance and the need for a swift and cost-efficient endogenous stimulus-powered novel drug-delivery m…
Physics and Astronomy
In order to conveniently simulate hamiltonian systems, I have developed online software that can simulate hamiltonian mechanics. Users can see the motion of a system as long as he tells the…
Earth and Environmental Sciences
Over the last few years, devastating fires in California have destroyed habitats, released toxic fumes, and caused extreme heat. The megafires of 2020 burned 4.5 million acres, straining fir…
Translational Medical Science
Cardiac arrhythmias occur when the electrical impulses that coordinate heart beats don't work properly. In the U.S., they cause over a million hospitalizations and over 200,000 sudden cardia…
Robotics and Intelligent Machines
Third Award
Glaucoma is the second leading cause of blindness, responsible for 15% percent of the total world blindness. It is a chronic eye disease that damages the optic nerve and causes irreversible…
Computational Biology and Bioinformatics
The microscopic structure of bone contributes to its resistance to crack propagation and high damage tolerance under mechanical loading. In everyday life, bone accumulates tiny fractures, ca…
Energy: Sustainable Materials and Design
Lithium-ion batteries are a crucial component in many applications. Failure to understand the battery lifetime can lead to rapid degradation, emission of harmful gases, and fatal explosions.…
Behavioral and Social Sciences
The interplay between three critical aspects --- biology of the virus, human behavior, and government policies --- determines the spread and impact of a given epidemic. With over 2.6 million…
Earth and Environmental Sciences
Fourth Award
Polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) pollution is a global issue affecting both the environment and human health. Although industrial PCB manufacturing has been banned, PCBs remain in water, soil,…
Earth and Environmental Sciences
Microplastics in the environment are a source of emerging pollution with proposed negative impacts across all ecosystems. Plastic preproduction pellets called nurdles are a form of microplas…
Earth and Environmental Sciences
Both the process of infrastructure development of settlements in suburban areas will have various impacts on changes in natural resources. Physically, the changes that occur are the reductio…
Systems Software
Covid-19 or the novel Coronavirus is a highly contagious disease, which has swept across the world as a pandemic. It has a high impact on the public's psychology. In this work, we primarily…
Biomedical and Health Sciences
Fourth Award
Immunotherapy has revolutionized some cancer treatments. Yet, the same treatments showed disappointing outcomes for most prostate cancer patients, with five-year survival rates of 99% for ea…
Mathematics
The SIR model is one of the simplest examples of a class of mathematical models, called 'compartmental models', that are used to predict the spread of an epidemic. A number of efficient nume…
Mathematics
The Collatz Conjecture and another of similar structure revolving around congruence modulus 3, can be represented as fractals when they are written as holomorphic functions. However, the met…
Behavioral and Social Sciences
Out of the 7.8 billion people on Earth today, over 1.3 billion of them suffer from a neurological condition, out of which over 450 million of them do not get their condition diagnosed or tre…
Behavioral and Social Sciences
Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) refer to traumatic childhood events like emotional, physical, and sexual abuse and other forms of household dysfunction. ACEs are associated with biomark…
Physics and Astronomy
The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) accelerates heavy ions through electromagnetic fields to relativistic speeds in order to observe the conditions at the beginning of the Universe. T…
Earth and Environmental Sciences
Fourth Award
Florida’s waters have recently been plagued by Harmful algal blooms. Although a variety of factors may act as contributors, nutrient loading is often cited as a major factor. Previous resear…
Computational Biology and Bioinformatics
Neurodegenerative diseases are one of the highest causes of death within the world. The WHO reported in 2016 that Alzheimer’s Disease and dementia were the 5th highest cause of death interna…
Behavioral and Social Sciences
Extreme political polarization has surfaced as a major threat to democracy, with recent events highlighting the need to understand both the causes and solutions of political polarization. Th…
Behavioral and Social Sciences
People’s feelings are often reflected in the way they write. For this project, texts were used to characterize the emotional state of people both throughout the decades and in different part…
Mathematics
Covid-19 reports have a substantial impact on the decisions that are made in making sure people are able to continue living their lives. Yet there have been multiple controversies on the acc…
Earth and Environmental Sciences
Fourth Award
In North America, the spruce beetle (Dendroctonus rufipennis) has killed more spruce trees than any other natural cause (Colorado State Forest Service, 2020). The purpose of this research pr…