Panel Session 1

The Simulating the Soviet Great Terror project focuses on designing a simulation game centered around the Soviet political purges from 1934 to 1938, and investigating the game’s use as an educational tool to enrich Presenters’ understanding of the purges. The simulation tests the revisionist argument about the social, economic, and political realities that existed in the Soviet Union during the ... Read More

Over the 20th century, the nature of genocide had become highly systematic and ideologically motivated, setting modern genocide apart from the rest of history. This year marks the 100th anniversary since the Armenian Genocide ended, and as we approach the 100 year marks of modern genocide: reflection is necessary. To ensure the future safety of people everywhere, we must analyze ... Read More

Increasing diversity in the booming field of computer science has long been a goal of educators. At Harvey Mudd College, interdisciplinary courses combining computer science and biology had a level of success. The goal of the project conducted at the University of Illinois at Chicago was to create two new classes taught in the 2016-2017 school year, one Computer Science ... Read More

The purpose of this study is to examine rural Presenters at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy to identify their motivation to engage in STEM education. Dr. Adrienne Coleman, the Multicultural Education Specialist at IMSA, was the primacy researcher, along with five IMSA Presenters, who conducted a qualitative study. According to research, rural Presenters are less likely to attend selective ... Read More

Previous studies show that several factors may affect the difficulty of reading comprehension questions, often related to their semantic or syntactic properties. However, the accurate prediction of item difficulty is still a challenge for the testing community. With more accurate models, test developers can produce items more efficiently, which will reduce costs, improve accuracy of skills measurement, and free up ... Read More

This investigation utilized both the SIR (Susceptible, Infected, and Recovered) and SI models to determine the progression of various diseases within blocks of a population. The constraints for experiment, chosen comprehensively as possible considering practicality were gender, age, and location (degrees of rural and urban both in the representative countries of each stage of the demographic transition). The experimenters modeled ... Read More

We introduce a distributed, greedy auction algorithm for an Internet of Things decision support system to evacuate civilians during public internal mass shootings. The public building environment is abstracted into a network of doors and rooms. During the emergency, door agents bid against neighboring doors using a safety score that considers crowd congestion, number of exit doors, and proximity to ... Read More

Characterizing and modeling the spread of infection in an outbreak is often important in determining how the outbreak is to be stopped. Many different factors must be considered, including vaccination, immunity, quarantine conditions, and rate of spread, however, all of these models rely on people randomly traveling from one community to another. We created a routine-based environment to model the ... Read More

The Zika Virus has been affecting people of three different age groups in over 40 different nations. In 2016 the outbreak affected a very wide population and in July, 93 million people were a risk of infection of the virus in Latin America and South America. Mathematics can be used to model the spread of the Zika virus by utilizing ... Read More

One of modern neuroscience’s most intriguing ideas is that cognition is embodied. Would saying or even thinking of words that correspond to actions cause activation in the regions of the brain that would normally be activated when physically performing the same actions? This study investigates whether brain activity after listening to a hearing-related noun and subsequently saying a hearing-related verb ... Read More

Epilepsy is a neurological condition of recurrent seizures as caused by changes in the structure of the brain, brain infection or disease, stroke, or genetic reasons. This study focuses on the determining areas of the brain that are active during memory retrieval, as seen through a long term memory test used on epileptic patient. By using data from a language ... Read More

We report on the progress of an ongoing study on the effect of parental responsiveness, socioeconomic status (SES), and early brain injury on language development in preschool children. Parental responsiveness has been shown to influence language development in children, but the effect of parental responsiveness in atypically developing has not been researched. Typically-developing children and children with early unilateral brain ... Read More

About 50 million Americans do not get adequate sleep, leading to dangerous and unproductive conditions in workplace. Much of this sleep deprivation is a result of poor sleep hygiene, or routine sleep habits and environment. The purpose of this study is to gauge the success of a Sleep Hygiene Educational Module on employees of the OSF Saint Francis Medical Center ... Read More

Schistosomiasis is a debilitating waterborne disease which affects 260 million people annually in poverty-stricken regions in Africa, Southeast Asia, and South America. Three species of worm transmit schistosomiasis in its larval stage through unsanitary water conditions. Only one drug, praziquantel, exists to combat schistosomiasis, but due to the disease’s prevalence, drug resistance is expected to develop soon. One protein that ... Read More

Vibrio cholerae is a gram negative bacterium that is spread through the fecal-oral route that can cause cholera when infected. It is commonly found in third world countries in contaminated water supplies. This study specifically looks into the Rho-Inactivation Domain (RID) effector domain found in the Multifunctional Autoprocessing Repeats-In-Toxin (MARTX) toxin found inside of the El Tor strain of this ... Read More

Pseudomonas aeruginosa (PA) is a rod-shaped gram negative bacterium that is associated with lung infection of humans with compromised host-defense such as cystic fibrosis. PA secretes proteins, lipopolysaccharides and virulence factors such as pyocyanin (PCN) that modulate host cell signal transduction and immune responses. PCN mediates its cellular effects via reactive oxygen species (ROS) production in host cells. However, molecular ... Read More

Herpes viruses, including herpes symplex virus type 1 (HSV-1), are human pathogens of a significant disease burden within the population. They are large, double-stranded DNA viruses with virions comprised of four layers: envelope, tegument, capsid, and viral DNA. The herpesvirus capsid dynamically interacts with viral and cellular proteins during multiple steps of the infectious cycle. The capsid selfassembles from six ... Read More

Chemokines are traditionally known for their roles in the inflammatory response although we now understand that they are also important in a wide variety of physiological and developmental processes A particular chemokine named stromal derived factor 1 (SDF-1) or CXCL12 and its cognate receptor CXCR4 plays a role in a number of biological processes such as embryonic development, stem cell ... Read More

Cancer remains a major cause of death around the world despite the significant progress made through research in targeted therapies and understanding of the biology of cancer. Mixed Lineage Leukemia (MLL) gene is linked to various cancers but is especially known for causing a variety of childhood leukemias. Also known as KMT2A, MLL is a chromatin modifier that modifies the ... Read More

Mutations in chromodomain helicase DNA binding protein 7 (CHD7) gene located in human chromosome 8 have been linked to “CHARGE” syndrome, a cluster of disease seen in a number children, for which there is no pharmacotherapy. As there is no cellular or animal model system to study the function of CHD7, the goal of this investigation is to mimic CHARGE ... Read More

This experiment was performed to determine the role of the Hedgehog (HH) signalling pathway and transcription factors GLI, specifically GLI 1, 2, and 3, in T-cell lymphoma. Using this knowledge we determined which drugs- both alone and in combination- were most effective as therapies. Lymphoma is an aggressive form of cancer that occurs after the abnormal growth of white blood ... Read More

Prostate cancer is the abnormal growth of cells in the prostate gland and studies have shown that 100% of men that die from prostate cancer have bone involvement. Of the many cells resident in the bone, myeloid cells secrete various soluble factors that contribute to the high turnover rate of cells and molecular processes of bone development. Of particular interest, ... Read More

The scarce naturally occurring phosphatidylinositol phosphate (PIP) Phosphatidylinositol-5-phosphate (PI5P) has been found in abnormally high concentrations in lung cancer cells. Due to its instability, PI5P is the only species of PIPs not to have been synthesized before. This research is aimed at synthesizing PI5P in sufficient quantities to facilitate studies on the role of PI5P in the rate of transcription ... Read More

Every year, around 12.7 million people around the world are diagnosed with cancer. The Mixed Lineage Leukemia (MLL) gene, a global chromatin modulator, was first identified in acute aggressive forms of childhood lekukemias. MLL normally regulates gene expression through histone methylation, but when mutated its downstream targets may change, causing excessive replication, exacerbated cell growth, and the formation of cancer. ... Read More

Congenital nevi are pigmented moles on the skin that can develop into melanoma, a malignant type of skin cancer. Minimally invasive treatment is needed to replace surgery in the case of pervasive congenital nevi. It was proposed that tyrosine analogs can be used to treat nevi and prevent cancer formation. Specifically, monobenzyl ether of hydroquinone (MBEH) has been used to ... Read More

The detection of pharmaceutical compounds, biomolecules, and chemicals plays a critical role in medical care, drug development, and environmental testing. In this study, the analytical performances of two novel materials, boron-doped nanocrystalline diamond (BDD) and nitrogen-incorporated tetrahedral amorphous (ta-C:N) carbon, were compared using flow injection analysis with amperometric detection. These electrodes offer potential improvements in the detection figures of merit ... Read More

When a drop of coffee dries on a solid surface, it leaves a dense, ring-like deposit along the perimeter. Coffee which is initially distributed throughout the drop ends up concentrated at the edge. There already exist theoretical explanations for this effect but they rely on the contact line of the drop remaining fixed (pinning) and the contact angle decreasing while ... Read More

Conjugated polymers are organic macromolecules containing alternating double and single bonds. In recent years, conjugated polymers have attracted considerable attention as chemosensory devices to detect nitroaromatic compounds which are commonly found in explosives. The goal of our research is to synthesize a conjugated polymer that will better detect nitroaromatic compounds by improving the efficiency in the polymer's detection abilities. We ... Read More

We designed a tracking system to be used in maritime mobile satellite communications. Position is updated each second using a GPS antenna, and the initial design used a magnetometer for heading determination. However, when the mobile apparatus with the sensors was tested on a track, it was found that disturbances in the magnetic field caused inaccuracies of more than 30 ... Read More

To maintain the orientation of an antenna on a moving object, particularly a boat, the instantaneous heading of the object must be known. With a focus on simplicity and robustness, we implemented a solution involving several GPS modules at set distances. We designed a method for heading determination using a least-squares model on a regular N-gon. Using a computer-simulated model, ... Read More

We investigate a ten-hour period of data from the GEOTAIL spacecraft with the hope of understanding the portion of the Earth’s magnetotail that the spacecraft encountered on September 17, 1993. By studying the magnetic field measurements (magnitude and components), along with electron flux from other instruments on the spacecraft, we speculate about the time periods that GEOTAIL was in particular ... Read More

The company Intelligent Designs LLC is the owner of a satellite that orbits the Earth approximately four times a day. This satellite, known as the Omnispace F2 satellite (formerly known as the ICOF2 satellite), is a medium earth orbit (MEO) satellite that is situated in an orbit which is at a 45º incline with respect to the equator and 10,500 ... Read More

A phenomenon that stands on the brink of revolutionizing our understanding of the cosmos, gravitational waves are disturbances in space-time, propagating from massive binary systems at the speed of light. Transparent to matter particulates and other obstacles that would normally hinder traditional, light-based observatories, gravitational waves hold the potential to provide clear, undistorted data on everything from the Big Bang ... Read More

Detecting gravitational waves has become a reality with GW150914 and will soon become a regular occurrence. A new detector is currently being built in Japan called KAGRA and INDIGO in India has been approved. A gravitational wave detector in Pisa, Italy, called VIRGO, will go online starting January 2017 and the current LIGO detectors in Hanford, Washington and Livingston, Louisiana ... Read More

Oxidative stress (OS) in response to intra- and extracellular environmental stress can induce carcinogenic mechanisms such as DNA damage and defective DNA repair. 8-hydroxy- 2’deoxyguanosine (8-OHdG), an oxidized nucleoside of DNA, is a marker of oxidative stress and has previously been measured in tissue samples only after cancer diagnosis. In this study, we examined the prospective and retrospective association between ... Read More

In order to study the plant defense signaling pathways, mutants of Arabidopsis thaliana were examined for phenotype and levels of salicylic acid (SA) in comparison to gain-of-function mutant acd6-1, which exhibits high disease resistance, dwarfism, and high SA levels. For T-series transformed suppressor mutants, diameter and height were measured in centimeters. Gene expression was also predicted using bioinformatics. T-105 and ... Read More