OR, United States of America

Revolution of Self-Fertilizing Crops: Novel Transformation of IFS1 and IFS2 Genes Using Binary Vector for the Stimulation of a Symbiotic Bond Between B. japonicum and Host Plant

Plant Sciences

The system of agriculture is inefficient. Agriculture follows the trend of adding artificial fertilizers to increase plant growth. This fertilizer is inadvertently destroying river ecosystem…

Safe with Me Now: A Novel System to Prevent Vehicular Hyperthermia in Children

Embedded Systems

In the past 20 years, over 700 children have died from vehicular hyperthermia. Preventative devices currently available on the market have many limitations, and are unable to detect when chi…

Single Chamber MFC: Filtration of Arsenic with an Exoelectrogenic Biofilm

Environmental Engineering Third Award

Microbial fuel cells (MFC) are a more renewable, cost efficient, and more effortless form of energy production. MFC take advantage of specific ion producing exoelectrogenic bacteria (G.sulfu…

Solution Grown and Tunable Plastic Magnets: Room Temperature Ferromagnetism in Mesoscopic Conjugated Polymer Rings

Chemistry First Award

Conventionally, ferromagnetic materials are restricted to metallic regime such as iron and nickel. However, if ferromagnetic behavior could be induced in organic polymers - it would offer ve…

The Effect of Paper, Electronic, and Audio-Electronic Reading Modalities on Reading Comprehension in Adults Aged 60 and Above

Behavioral and Social Sciences Third Award

This study investigated how paper (PRM), electronic (ERM), and audio-electronic (AERM) reading modalities affected reading comprehension in adults age 60 and older. It was hypothesized that…

The Moral Sentence; Is It Right to Penalize People of Generalized Social Classes by a Crowd-Sourced Judging of Peers?

Behavioral and Social Sciences

Basically, “The Moral Sentence” is a survey where tests subject compared two people with varying descriptions of their wealth and moral behavior. From that, the test subjects had to decide w…

UAV Obstacle Avoidance and Collision Prevention System

Robotics and Intelligent Machines

The drone industry is projected to be worth over 127 billion dollars by the year 2020 (Sun, 2016). This means drones will be everywhere: monitoring our food crops, delivering our packages, a…

Addressing Global Water Scarcity with a Novel Hydrogel Based Desalination Technique Using Saponified Starch-g-polyacrylamide and Its Hydrophilic Properties to Harvest Fresh Water with a Low Energy and Chemical Footprint

Second Award

To address global fresh water scarcity, a novel hydrogel based seawater desalination technique using a superabsorbent starch based polymer is proposed. Current approaches rely on thermal, me…

A Highly Efficient and Economically Profitable Electrocatalytic Conversion of Carbon Dioxide using Nanostructured Electrodes

Energy: Sustainable Materials and Design Third Award

An efficient and economically profitable process for the electrochemical conversion of carbon dioxide to valuable chemicals such as methanol and formic acid was investigated to address the s…

Alzheimer's Disease Risk Model Using Survival Analysis: Identifying Key Modifiable Risk Factors to Be Implemented in Public Health Strategy

In its present form, this fourth-year investigation into Alzheimer's disease risk factors addresses the following question: what factors contribute the most in increasing an individual's lik…

A Novel Approach to Cancer Treatment: Allosteric Inhibition of the Carbonic Anhydrase IX Isozyme for Anticancer Applications

Fourth Award

Due to lack of oxygen, the Hypoxia Inducible Factor pathway triggers the overexpression of the human Carbonic Anhydrase (CA) IX isozyme in many hypoxic tumors such as colon, brain, cervix, b…

A Novel Nanoparticle-microRNA Treatment to Overcome Drug Resistance and Tumor Metastasis in Lung Cancer

The development of drug resistance and tumor metastasis in cancer cells severely limits chemotherapy effectiveness. This study used a novel approach of combining gene therapy with nanotechno…

A Smart Burn and Spill Proof “SAFE” Microwave that Spares the Salad: Novel Application of Levenberg-Marquardt Algorithms in Bayesian Analysis for Real-Time Numerical Thermodynamic Modeling

Third Award

The microwave oven is a commonplace appliance used by millions worldwide. Even after half a century from its commercialization, this technology has remained static and no fundamental improve…

A Study of Biases in Perception

Systems Software

As humans, we like to believe that we are fully in control of our minds. However, we are discovering that subconscious biases greatly affect our perceptions. Learning more about the roots of…

Continuous Production of Biodiesel through Reactive Distillation using Eggshell Catalysts

This experiment was designed to revolutionize the manner in which biodiesel is manufactured by condensing what is currently a multi-step technique into a batch system through the process of…

Deep Learning Action Recognition on Small Data: Transfer Learning the Stanford 40 Actions Dataset

In the field of artificial intelligence, computers are exceptional at recognizing objects from images, but struggle with recognizing actions from images. In 2011, a human action dataset (Sta…

Development of a Device to Assess the Impact of Real-Time Auditory Biofeedback on Gait in Patients with Multiple Sclerosis

The three typically-recognized sources of sensory input relevant to the human balance system are the eyes, nerves in muscles and joints, and the vestibular system. This project set out to de…

Diagnosis of Dementia with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

Diagnosis of dementia is a difficult and challenging problem. The availability of public MRI data is limited, and computer-aided methods typically rely on handcrafted features. In this work,…

Efficient, Hardware Implementations of Computationally-Intensive Operations in Quotient Polynomial Rings for NTRU-Based Digital Signatures

Fourth Award

The security of data is a major issue in today’s society–one way to ensure this security is to use digital signatures. NTRUSign, the signature scheme based on the N-th Degree Truncated Polyn…

Evaluating the Relationship between College Information Literacy and College-Going Self-Efficacy in High School Students

Biomedical and Health Sciences

The objective of this study was to examine the relationship between college information literacy (CIL) and college going self-efficacy (CGSE) in high school students. Research suggests the d…

Fabrication, Characterization, and Modeling of a Biodegradable Battery for Transient Electronics

Traditionally, emphasis has been placed on durable, long-lasting electronics. However, electronics that are meant to intentionally degrade over time can actually have significant practical a…

Investigating a Novel Treatment for Breast Cancer Brain Metastasis: The Alpha-v Integrin Inhibitor Cilengitide Potentiates Cisplatin Chemotherapy

Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women worldwide with almost 1.7 million new cases every year. A deadly form of breast cancer, called breast cancer brain metastasis, results in a m…

Lung Cancer Decision Support System: Novel Automated Noninvasive Tumor Malignancy and Patient Outcomes Prediction Modelling through Radiomics Phenotype Feature Quantification

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer related deaths in the world. Despite therapeutic advances, the overall five year survival rate remains low, near 16%. Prediction of patient outcome…

Nature vs. Nurture: Do Your Genetics or Environment Affect Your Surface Microbiome More?

Human skin is colonized by millions of microorganisms which help protect the body from harmful viruses and bacteria and keep it healthy. Previous research has shown that the human skin micro…

New Evidence for a Potential Citalopram Hydrobromide Mediated Mechanism Influencing the Suppression of Serotonergic Neurons during Brain Development

Citalopram hydrobromide, an antidepressant agent found in the drug Celexa, has led to numerous suicide attempts (Schneeweiss, 2010). Suicidal thoughts and actions have been directly associat…

Novel Synthesis of Water-Soluble Paramagnetic Polymer Nanoparticles (Metal Free) for Selective Drug Delivery and Cancer Therapy Applications

Iron oxide based superparamagnetic nanoparticles have the potential for revolutionary breakthroughs in applications such as selective drug delivery or cancer therapy because of the guidance…

Protein Interface Targeted Aptamers Screened Using Competitive Selection

Fourth Award

Nucleic acid aptamers are single stranded DNA or RNA that bind targets ranging from large biomolecules to small chemicals, with affinities and specificities emulating antibodies, and provide…

Quakify: A Low-Cost, Crowdsourced, Real-Time Solution to Earthquake Early Warning

Second Award

The goal of this project is to design a low-cost earthquake early warning solution (Quakify) to provide adequate warning prior to hazardous ground shaking in a location. Harnessing the power…

Riparian Disturbance & Remote Sensing Technology: A Novel Method to Identify Vulnerabilities within Urban Areas of the Willamette River Basin

Through the application of remote sensing technology and the utilization of ArcGIS mapping software, this study validates the importance of riparian vegetation, and extends this knowledge fu…

Spectroscopic Analysis of Titanium Oxide Presence in Stars

In this study, a spectroscopic data analysis of Titanium Oxide Presence in stars will be presented and the elemental composition will be discussed. The experimental procedure consisted of an…