United States of America

Designing a Reliable Child Seat Alarm

Each year in America, an average of 38 children die as a result of heatstroke from being left in a hot car. Often times this is a result of the adult being distracted and forgetting about th…

Detecting Early Stage Metastatic Breast Cancer: A Novel Approach to the Engineering of a Gold Nanorod Based Point-of-Care Biosensor

Systems Software Third Award

This research project details the development and implementation of a novel biosensor utilizing gold nanorods for the early stage detection of HER2-mediated breast cancer. Aspect ratio depen…

Detecting Novel Strains of Lassa Virus via an Interdisciplinary Modernization Based on Genomic Sequencing

The rapid evolution of viral species complicates the management of chronic infections and the control of emerging infectious agents. Especially for pathogens that are highly fatal upon infec…

Detecting Plagiarism

This experiment sought to discover whether a certain set of software techniques, including "string comparison", "bag of words", and "fingerprinting", were more effective than one another. Th…

Determining Maximum Carpool Potential: A Study of Car Sharing Efficiency

The purpose of this experiment is to determine the maximum carpool potential for the upper school student body at Trinity School in Midland. Carpool potential could be defined as the maximum…

Determining Percent of Germination of 2014 Wheat Samples as a Function of Falling Number

Our purpose was to determine if falling numbers had any impact on germination rate in spring wheat and Kamut samples. Falling number is the internationally recognized standard for determinin…

Determining Science-Based Solutions for Emergence of Tetracycline Resistant Bacteria

Emergence of antibiotic resistant bacteria is a major concern for human health. Identities of the resistant bacteria as well as mechanisms by which they become resistant to antibiotics are l…

Determining the Optimal Growing Conditions for Nannochloropsis Algae for Economically Feasible Biofuel Production

For decades scientists have used an array of organic materials to produce environmentally friendly biofuel. But only recently has algae been introduced as a possible candidate for biofuel pr…

Determining the Relative Affinities of Alkaloids in Reed Canarygrass for Tannic Acid

Gramine, hordenine, and tannic acid are secondary metabolites found in animal fodder, such as reed canarygrass and sorghum, that can be toxic or detrimental to animals. However, these plant…

Determining the Role of Visual Signals in the Neurological Aspect of Speech: Implications for the Treatment of Speech Motor Programming Disorders

Computational Biology and Bioinformatics

Speech is produced by a set of neurological and motor processes, known as speech motor programming. When regions of the brain controlling speech are damaged, speakers are not able to properl…

Determining the Stiffness Threshold of a PEG Hydrogel for Motor Neuron Axon Extension

Motor neuron degenerative diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) currently have no cures and mostly unknown causes. For motor neurons to function properly, axon extension is ne…

Deterministic and Stochastic Analysis in Biomedical Engineering: Chaotic Dynamics vs. Brownian Motion

The goal of this research project is to analyze and to classify the Electrocardiograms (EKGs) of healthy and unhealthy patients through two novel methods. The first method consists of viewin…

Developing a Comprehensive, Efficient, and Mulit-Layered Navigation Algorithm for Coordinating Driverless Vehicles

With the advent of Google’s automated cars, newer technology is being incorporated into the actual driving of vehicles. They possess the sensors and processing power necessary to perform the…

Developing a More Efficient Fusion Reactor through Computer Modeling

Producing the conditions necessary for nuclear fusion in current reactor designs requires using more energy than the process of fusion releases. This is due to the level of energy required t…

Developing an Accurate Model of Microwave Propulsion

Spacecraft are often limited by the efficiency of their engines and the amount of propellant they can carry. Recently, however, a new experimental propulsion technique known as microwave pro…

Developing an Automatic Nonrigid Image Registration Algorithm for Nanoscience Research

Scanning Tunneling Spectroscopy (STS) images are powerful tools that allow scientists to quantify the local atomic properties of surfaces, supporting the characterization and development of…

Developing an Effective Phage Therapy for Treatment of Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus aureus

Bacteriophages have potent abilities in eliminating deadly bacterial infections. Bacteriophage K, a member of the lytic bacteriophage family Myoviridae, is a virus that uses bacteria to repr…

Developing an Efficient Plant Counting System Using Robotic Sensors

Cotton is one of the most valued crops grown in the U.S. with a projected 16 million bales for the 2014/2015 period. This project focuses on plant stand accuracy during the early growing sta…

Developing an mRNA-Mediated Gene Expression Strategy in Mouse Embryonic Stem Cells

Translational Medical Science

The treatment of many injuries and diseases requires engineered tissues. However, there is a severe lack of specific cells for tissue engineering. Embryonic stem cells (ESCs) are a promising…

Developing a Program to Identify Targets for Transit Followup for the Minerva Telescope Array

Third Award

Minerva is a cutting-edge telescope array focused on the detection of exoplanets in the habitable zone of their stars. The first objective in the fledgling stages of this array is to perform…

Developing Effective Solar-Powered Agitators for Mosquito Control in Stagnant Water

Fourth Award

Mosquitoes are vectors for many dangerous diseases such as Malaria, Dengue, Yellow Fever, West Nile etc. Mosquito transmitted diseases occur mostly in tropical, developing countries and crea…

Developing Mobile Algorithms to Detect Seizures and Falls

Second Award

This science investigation is aimed at developing smart phone algorithms for automated detection of seizures and falls. The product of this investigation is the Seizario app, which utilizes…

Development of a Cost Effective Swept-Frequency Capacitive Sensor as a Gesture Recognizing Touch Interface

A capacitive sensing system was developed that operates on a swept frequency, unlike the static frequencies of conventional sensing methods. The initial prototype used an Arduino Uno as the…

Development of a Filtration System for Simulated Wastewater Treatment to Reduce Microplastic Pollution in a Freshwater Ecosystem

Objective: To develop and test an effective filters for wastewater treatment plants that will remove mircoplastics from different clothing fabrics. Hypotheses: When treating water containing…

Development of a General Data Mining Methodology based on a Novel Weighted Hierarchical Adaptive Voting Ensemble Method and Its Applications

There are many machine learning methods developed for individual applications, and each has its strengths and weaknesses. However, none of these can be used for all databases and deliver sat…

Development of an Authorship Identification Algorithm for Twitter Using Stylometric Techniques

I developed software that implements semi-supervised learning to dramatically improve accuracy when stylometrically attributing an unidentified tweet to the correct author from a set of know…

Development of a NGS Assay for Cancer Screening Using Methylated DNA Biomarkers

Systems Software

This project is to develop a novel targeted next generation sequencing (NGS) assay for early screening of Colorectal Cancer (CRC) using methylated DNA Biomarkers. CRC is the second leading c…

Development of a Novel Biomarker Algorithm for the Early Detection of Liver Cancer

Systems Software

The objective of this project was to develop and test a novel biomarker algorithm for a screening test for the early detection of liver cancer. Liver cancer has risen to the forefront of let…

Development of a Novel Near-Infrared Fluorescent Theranostic Anticancer Prodrug

With the improvements of cancer treatment selectivity and real-time monitoring in mind, the goal of this project was to develop an anticancerous prodrug that could concurrently track and inh…

Development of a Novel Spatial Frequency Domain Method for Fluorescence Imaging in Tumor Detection

Systems Software

Optical imaging plays an integral role in pre-operative tumor detection. In molecular imaging with fluorescent contrast agents, non-flat surfaces scatter excitation light across the region o…