Biomedical Engineering
Past studies indicated that Drosophila (fruit flies) share 75% of the genes that cause diseases with humans. Thus by studying fruit fly genetics, one can learn about human genetics and possi…
Thermal power plants generate coal-ash, a bi-product of combustion, which is drained in a liquefied form into man-made ponds, called coal-ash ponds. These coal-ash ponds contain dangerous ch…
The title of the experiment is Coating: Effect of Particle Size and Shape. The purpose of the experiment is to determine how pigment size and shape affect the strength of the latex/pigment c…
Ocean Acidification is the reduction in the pH of the ocean due to absorption of CO2 in the atmosphere. When absorbed the carbon dioxide mixes with ocean water to create carbonic acid. The a…
Energy: Sustainable Materials and Design
The purpose of my project was to determine if it is possible to detect heavy metals in coconut water, when the coconut plant grows on contaminated soil. Since coconut plants take a long time…
First Award
Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) has the shortest survival time of any cancer, and affects more than 850,000 people worldwide as the second leading cause of cancer-related mortality. Understan…
World Health Organization reported that antibiotic resistance is a serious worldwide threat to human health. In United States, two million illnesses and 23,000 deaths are attributed to antib…
Energy: Sustainable Materials and Design
Second Award
This is a continuation project (Year 3). Two types of simple, cost-effective, reusable electrochemical sensors were created with functionalized gold nanoparticles (~1.6 nm core diameter) for…
The purpose of this project was to determine which alternative treatment is the most effective at preventing E. coli O157:H7 cell growth and/or Shiga toxin production. It was hypothesized th…
Systems Software
The purpose of this study is to identify a statistical relationship between owning a dog and the Big Five Personality Facets. Many prospective parents have decided to practice with a dog bef…
Acinetobacter baylyi, a gram-negative soil bacterium, is highly competent for natural transformation, a process in which DNA is imported across cellular membranes and potentially recombined…
Systems Software
The purpose of this study was to observe how conflicting classical reward conditionings affect the memory which is a basic concept of learning and memory, though poorly understood. The hypot…
The purpose of this experiment was to determine whether a home server, or NAS, is a viable competitor to consumer cloud services such as Mediafire or Google Drive. We hypothesized that, beca…
Fourth Award
Shingles, herpes zoster virus, affects many middle aged adults around the world, exhibiting symptoms of pain, itching, burning, and postherpetic neuralgia. In an attempt to discover effectiv…
Composing music with sign language pattern recognition provided the concept of being able to communicate with any system through sign language whether it be composing music or translating a…
Systems Software
Chromatin remodeling, modification of nuclear chromatin allowing for the regulation of gene expression, is believed to be an integral part of memory encoding. The enzyme PARP-1 and its produ…
TDP-43, a protein functioning in transcription and pre-mRNA splicing regulation, is known to cause exon skipping on the CFTR and apoA-II genes by binding to TG-repeat motifs 12 bases or long…
My eleven-year-old sister, Kate, was born with a heart condition which causes her to have a heart murmur. Kate’s pediatrician first diagnosed her by carefully listening to her murmur several…
Currently, oral cancer patients visit a pathologist in order to determine the severity of their oral cancer. The pathologist then takes a biopsy of the oral tissue, which undergoes a chemica…
Fourth Award
The purpose of this project was to create a low cost, highly functional, and lightweight computer mouse device that could be used with a large range of physically impaired and disabled perso…
Fourth Award
Solar power technologies, which offer sustainable, clean energy sources, are developing to improve efficiency of energy conversion and storage. Concentrated solar power (CSP) plants are an e…
Ocean acidification is the ongoing decrease in the pH of the Earth’s oceans, caused by an increase in carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere. The more CO2 produced, the more oceans absorb.…
The purpose of this project is to utilize mixed plastic regrind in concrete as a practical and environmentally friendly use of waste that would otherwise end up in landfills or worse — the e…
Biomedical and Health Sciences
This experiment was preformed to find a possible correlation between the symptoms experienced after a concussion, and the age that a person was at the time the concussion occurred. It was hy…
In our everyday lives, networks play an important role: networks like the internet, the road system of a society, the atoms of a molecule or the neurons of a brain. The mathematical discipli…
Biomedical and Health Sciences
Clinical studies that relate different cancers to various carcinogens can be quite costly, and may last anywhere from a couple of years to a few decades. This project is twofold, in that fir…
Triangulation has been a popular choice for mapping 3D positions because of its speed and cost. However, it is constrained by the correspondence problem and limited to almost zero inter-fram…
A fusion protein contains two or more independent proteins joined together. Fusion proteins have many applications as reporters for simultaneous detection by different methods, such as fluor…
Translational Medical Science
In a process called Atherosclerosis, plaque builds up within the walls of arteries, and they limit blood supply, disturb oxygen flow, and ultimately lead to other cardiovascular diseases. To…
Most prosthetic devices do not use computer-enabled mechanical components. The most advanced prototype systems, currently under development, seek to create neuro-mechanical interfaces. These…