Session 1

When non-native plants are introduced to new communities, they can quickly become invasive, threatening native species and damaging the ecosystem. Understanding how a plant becomes invasive helps us develop more effective ways to manage and prevent ecosystem invasion. Phenology, the study of life cycle events such as leafing and flowering dates, is one lens to examine invasive establishment through. A ... Read More

Phenol is an environmental pollutant produced through both industrial waste and natural processes. Occupational exposure and the effects of high concentrations of phenol have been well recorded. However, long-term exposure with small concentrations is rather unknown despite the possible negative health effects associated with this exposure. We are working towards understanding the relationship between phenol exposure and health in terms ... Read More

In today’s world, there is a constant threat of environmental pollutants, which negatively affect the daily lives of humans. One of these known pollutants is phenol, found commonly in low concentrations in consumer products such as mouthwash, lotions, and ointments. Phenol has been found to accelerate senescence and decrease lifespan when introduced during early development. This study utilized Drosophila melanogaster, ... Read More

The g-factor in particle physics represents how a particle couples to a magnetic field. Paul Dirac predicted the g-factor of a muon to be exactly two, however, this prediction did not account for quantum effects which were not known at his time. The combined effects of quantum electrodynamics, quantum chromodynamics, and electroweak interactions slightly increase the g-factor. Considering these effects, ... Read More

Perhaps no field in physics has grown as rapidly as particle physics—going from nonexistence to major budget item in only a few decades. Boosted by the Manhattan Project, particle physics has enjoyed billions of dollars in federal research support for more than half a century. In an era of skepticism toward government spending and ever-tightening discretionary budgets, it seems reasonable ... Read More

The purpose of this study is to examine rural students at the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy to identify their motivation to engage in STEM education and investigate the rural STEM divide. Five IMSA students, advised by Dr. Coleman, the Director of Equity/Inclusion at IMSA, conducted this qualitative study. Literature suggests rural students are less likely to attend selective colleges ... Read More

According to the literature there are racial/ethnic inequities that exist in STEM education and careers. Much of the research has examined “how and why certain groups have more or less access, opportunity, and success in the educational trajectories leading to STEM occupations” (Riegle-Crumb & King, 2011). The 2015 U.S. News/Raytheon STEM Index indicates a slow progression in addressing these inequities ... Read More

We aim to create a porous ceramic water filter that would provide drinkable water for families in developing countries. The performance targets were a bacterial kill rate of 99% and a flow rate of 2 L/hr. Varying amounts of clay (and sometimes sand or grog), sawdust, and water were mixed and hand-pressed into disks (16 cm in diameter and 2 ... Read More

The lack of potable water in the developing world will be the focus of this session. The negative impact on people as well as the range of programs and products intended to mitigate it will be briefly surveyed. Silver-based ceramics will be explored in depth. With the help of organizations and individuals, sites of indigenous production for these ceramics have ... Read More

Swarms have been studied for a good long time, with the first studies emerging in the late 1980s and early 1990s. While these and subsequent studies examined the power of artificial swarms and developed ideas about what swarms were beyond simple groups of autonomous agents, no study has yet demonstrated the power of an engineering paradigm that can build swarms ... Read More

As ropes and other one dimensional extended objects, knots and links can be found in everyday life. In the study of Knot Theory, a knot is an embedding of a circle in three dimensional space and is represented by a diagram in the plane. A link is an embedding of number of disjoint circles and is correspondingly represented by a ... Read More

Neurodegeneration and cognitive impairment in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) are believed to be driven by the accumulation of the Aβ peptide and phosphorylated tau protein. Recent research suggests that in addition to Aβ peptide and phosphorylated tau deposition, neuroinflammation plays a pivotal role in Alzheimer’s disease dementia. Microglia are the resident macrophages of the brain’s immune system that are responsible for ... Read More

The basal ganglia is a collection of brain nuclei involved in both the planning and execution of sequenced movements as well as learning successful goal-directed behaviors, but it’s still poorly understood. We researched the inhibitory pathway between the external globus pallidus (GPe) and the dorsal striatum (dStr). Over 95% of the cells composing the striatum are two classes of spiny ... Read More

We combined polymer synthesis and drug capsule release to create a capsule that will effectively release a drug, allowing for the direct administration and expansion of skin somatic stem cells. The support of these cells on a skin wound effectively accelerates wound healing. The researchers used biocompatible and biodegradable materials to create a hydrogel that will contain a capsule created ... Read More

Alzheimer’s disease is a neurodegenerative disorder characterized by deterioration of memory, visuospatial ability, and executive function. Neurodegeneration associated with Alzheimer’s disease is progressive and irreversible, and it is believed that long-term prognosis of patients would be significantly improved with an early diagnosis. Various diagnostic approaches have been developed, including those targeting amyloid fibrils, yet fibrils are not closely linked to ... Read More

Tropical rainforests have a large impact on global climate because they are responsible for about ⅓ of the carbon dioxide exchange between the atmosphere and the biosphere and store large amounts of carbon (C) as biomass in trees. Soil nutrient availability is an important factor influencing C cycling in forests by controlling tree growth and leaf nutrient concentrations. Our experiment ... Read More

GPUs are able to provide supercomputer-level performance at vastly lower prices and, as a result, have become increasingly popular for general purpose computing, such as machine learning and cryptography. However, GPUs have been historically hard to program. NESL is a first order functional programming language that utilizes Nested Data Parallelism (NDP). NDP is the ability to apply any function, even ... Read More

The Fermilab Mu2e experiment seeks to investigate the decay of muons into electrons. The experiment uses several superconducting magnets to create a complex magnetic field to transport the muons from their production point to the interaction region. To map the magnetic fields, precision 3D Hall probes

are used. The field map requirements demand a calibration of the Hall probes to ... Read More

The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) Experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a particle detector that is being used to search for supersymmetric particles. The top quark is one of the most important particles in the search for Supersymmetry, and it and its supersymmetric partner, the stop particle, are highly sought after at CMS, as the stop particle ... Read More

The advent of 3D printing and Arduino programming has opened up a new world for hobbyists, entrepreneurs, engineers, and tinkerers. It is now possible to use such technology to solve big problems at relatively low cost. There has long been a need for better horticultural instrumentation for use in both commercial and research settings. These recent technological developments have therefore ... Read More

Remote sensing of plant vitality and growth has been a major research field since the 1960s, and highly accurate multi-spectral sensors are necessary to provide useful data points for measuring healthy vegetation. Vegetation health and density within a given area is measured by the Normalized Difference

Vegetation Index (NDVI). NDVI determines plant vitality through the measure of chlorophyll activity; live ... Read More

June’s Learning Laboratory (JLL) is our first step to creating a better world by advocating for a more culturally accepting society that appreciates everyone regardless of their abilities. Our innovative curriculum along with 3D printed hands will encourage high school students to have more passion for everyone on our planet.

There are several aspects to JLL that would make positive ... Read More

When a drop of liquid is set on a solid surface, it forms a contact angle with the surface described by Young’s equation with some variance, the magnitude of which is known as the contact angle hysteresis. Under certain situations, drying drops exhibit an exceptionally large contact angle hysteresis and while there are theoretical explanations for this, they remain unsatisfactory. ... Read More