Session II

This paper aims to present a comprehensive view of the widely acknowledged correspondence between educational neuroscience and investigative neurology, introducing a systematic study by which the unanswered questions of its contemporary research may be thoroughly explored. Researchers strive to identify the biological structures that underlie classical cognition, and to, in a novel fashion, develop an efficient methodology and practice by ... Read More

Impacts of climate change are becoming more evident across the world and expecting to become increasingly disruptive in just a few decades. To prevent the global temperature from rising, using cleaner energy is becoming significantly important. Advancements in hydrogen solution, one of the cleanest energy available, can increase renewable energy sector efficiency by strategizing new clean solutions for the future. ... Read More

Speeko is an application on iPhones and iPads that aims to improve public speaking skills through the use of artificial intelligence. Users are able to record their voice, which the app then gives immediate feedback and tailored lessons to refine their speech. The focus of the business project is to increase Speeko’s market prevalence and digital footprint through an affiliate ... Read More

Self-determination theory (SDT) is a mega-theory about motivation. Basic Psychological Need Theory (BPNT), a sub-theory of SDT, claims that motivation is fostered when all three basic psychological needs - autonomy, competence, and relatedness - are satisfied. Need-Based Teaching is a theory that aims to furnish these needs by producing autonomy support, structure, and involvement. Furthermore, self-efficacy is defined as the ... Read More

The discovery and development of effective antiviral drugs for COVID-19 are urgent and ongoing. An initiative to contribute to this process is COVID Moonshot project. The aim of the project is to rapidly develop easily manufacturable antiviral drugs that can inhibit the SARS-CoV-2 main protease. To provide leads for the intractable biological target in COVID, we used fragment-based drug discovery ... Read More

Over 20 million people in the United States have peripheral nerve injuries, which result in approximately $150 billion spent in annual health-care dollars in the United States. For those living with peripheral nerve injuries spanning over 5 centimeters, treatment options can be especially elusive. With a nine-month literature review spanning hundreds of journal articles as well as interviews with multiple ... Read More

The COVID-19 Pandemic has created opportunities for the development of new approaches to routine activities. Even after the pandemic ends, virtual alternatives to past in-person chores and errands will prove efficient and time saving. With robots becoming more and more advanced, they can be used to replace in-person activities that could be potentially dangerous or less favorable to the participants. ... Read More

The most commonly prescribed disease-modifying antirheumatic drug (DMARD) is methotrexate (MTX) because it is one of the most effective treatments for inflammation and it is relatively safe. Because it is taken at a low dose, it must be taken with other DMARDs to control the disease progression. To improve the efficacy of MTX in rheumatoid arthritis, its structure was modified ... Read More

This analysis focuses on genera ng a histogram which records the rate of acceptance as a function of invariant mass. This entails developing two distinct histograms: one which records the total number of generated events within certain invariant mass ranges and a second which only counts events which successfully reconstruct two leptons of transverse momentum at least 50 GeV. The ... Read More

Human evaluation of machine translation is extensive, but expensive and inefficient, thus, automated evaluation metrics were created. Yet despite recent advances in the field of machine translation, there has been little changed about standard automated evaluation metrics such as BLEU. As the quality of machine translation systems has dramatically improved over the past decade, evaluation becomes an increasingly challenging— and ... Read More

Ovarian cancer has the fifth lowest survival rate by cancer type at 48% after 5 years, however in earlier stages ovarian cancer has a lower mortality rate. This makes the use of biomarkers useful for tracking the progression of ovarian cancer and as a therapeutic target. In this research project two biomarkers were studied, CA-125 and MR-1, to form a ... Read More

Breast cancer patients have reported symptoms such as fatigue, insomnia, and depression while undergoing adjuvant therapy. Previous research has found that chemotherapy, a treatment for breast cancer, can lead to cognitive decline. However, the neurologic effects of other adjuvant therapies, such as hormone therapy, have yet to be fully explored. The objective of this study was to use diffusion tensor ... Read More

The goals of my project have been to find the value of public transportation as it relates to quality of life. Public transit is an expensive piece of many cities, and the people who pay for it are the taxpayers, using income. I am hoping to see my data as clear visual representations of this relation. My data and the ... Read More

Rising temperatures due to global warming spur concerns over whether plant life will be able to feed the rapidly growing global population. One solution is to improve the resilience of plants to climate change through genetic modification. Rubisco activase (RCA) is a particularly important target because it loses efficiency rapidly at high temperatures, impairing photosynthesis. Our goal is to engineer ... Read More

Long-lived dark photons decay away from the initial particle collision location; thus, they fail all regular triggers, which dismiss vertices a certain distance from the center of the beam pipe. Since the resulting lepton jets are grouped closely together, we cannot perform isolation cuts either. To trigger the displaced lepton jets, we wrote a missing transverse energy trigger module with ... Read More

In general, estrogen receptor positive breast cancers (ER+ BC) have a high treatability. However, these tumors often recur following endocrine therapy due to breast cancer stem cell (BCSC) activity. BCSC are a group of cells that possess numerous properties, such as self-renewal and the ability to survive independently in the circulation and contribute to breast cancer relapse. Many studies have ... Read More

Deriving its name from the Spanish definition of “Short Afternoon Nap”, the Siesta Wrap offers the comfortable support of a traditional pillow, and the warmth of a full-size blanket, in one product. The Siesta Wrap can fold into a compact design using a built-in pouch in the back of the pillow. Currently, Siesta Wrap is a growing startup and plans ... Read More

Technexus is a venture investment company that connects leading corporations with ventures in an effort to create potential growth opportunities. Over the last six months, various teams within the company provided insight into how venture investment companies such as Technexus find, connect, nurture, and assist start-ups in an effort to help ensure their success in their field. One of the ... Read More

There are a variety of internal and external factors that can possibly affect the decision a voter makes on Election Day. The purpose of this research is to identify if there is a correlation between household income (among other variables) and gubernatorial elections in the Midwest, which could be useful for evaluating potential outcomes of an election in a given ... Read More

June’s Learning Laboratory (JLL) has developed a cultural competency curriculum to educate middle school students about the cultures and experiences of those around them and their role in the world. We will conduct research testing the effectiveness of this newly constructed curriculum by comparing the data collected from the surveys given to the participants before and after being taught the ... Read More

The buildup of Amyloid-beta oligomers (AβOs) is regarded as a central toxic event in Alzheimer’s disease (AD) development. Recently, AβOs have been found in the developing chick retina but do not cause a disease state. Conserved by evolution, the functional role of these AβOs in retinal development is not currently known. Our team in the Klein Lab has found that ... Read More

Due to the onset of climate change, measures must be taken to circumvent the decreased rate of net photosynthesis of Glycine max (soybean) under high temperatures. Although the decreased rate is due to a myriad of factors, one promising avenue to a solution is the enzyme rubisco activase (RCA). At higher temperatures, RCA is unable to activate Rubisco to fix ... Read More

Transformer networks have shown great promise in video classification and understanding tasks by reducing the dependency on recurrent networks, and instead using self-attention techniques. Recurrent techniques are often not suitable for videos/data with long-term temporal dependencies due to the vanishing gradient problem, as well as the inability to fully backpropagate due to computational power restrictions. By using self-attention, a neural ... Read More

The aim of this study is to answer the following question as thoroughly as possible: how has the COVID-19 pandemic effected the global standing of both personal and political freedom? To do this, the study uses the Freedom in the World Index (FIW) scores for 2020 and the trends that the new scores show compared to previous years. The FIW ... Read More

Stress results in fight or flight responses. Corticotropin-releasing factor (CRF) is a peptide hormone involved in the stress response, thus, CRF neurons are highly activated by stress. However, it is unclear how CRF neurons are involved in stress-evoked movement. The external globus pallidus(GPe), a nucleus in the basal ganglia that critically controls movement, expresses high levels of the primary receptor ... Read More

Mental health can be affected by a combination of biological, environmental and psychological factors. This paper is a literature review focusing on if and how culture affects the mental health of those between the ages of thirteen and nineteen in the United States. There are many ways in which culture shows its influence. In some cultures, there are certain stigmas ... Read More

As the SARS-CoV-2 global pandemic rages on with new variants on the rise, rapid and effective therapeutic developments are needed more than ever before. Analyses that the repurposing of already approved FDA drugs has the potential to quickly showcase on the market drugs that can inhibit the replication of new viruses. Repurposing is especially helpful for SARS-CoV-2 considering the nature ... Read More

Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) is a stage IV astrocytoma, accounting for over 60% of all brain tumors in adults and a very poor prognosis of just 14-15 months. Despite numerous current treatment options, GBM recurs 90% of the time. With barriers in affordability and hesitance toward synthetic medicines, many people have turned to natural treatments for GBM. Last year, we tested ... Read More

NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope was designed to determine the frequency of Earth-sized planets orbiting sun-like stars, and while the number of these planets detected by Kepler is already known, the efficiency and accuracy of the telescope’s instruments are not extremely clear or precise. Using planetary transits accessed from Kepler lightcurve data, one can apply machine-learning methods for detecting transits and ... Read More

This analysis examines the extraneous leptons that have been simulated in reconstructed doubly-charged Higgs events. When the code that simulates these events is run, some of the produced events have five leptons indicating an extra lepton. This is an issue because doubly charged Higgs bosons decay into two leptons each, which creates a total of four leptons per event. We ... Read More

Hypertension continues to be a public health crisis in the United States because it carries a significant risk of contributing to cardiovascular diseases which leads to disability, death, and high healthcare expenditure. Nationally, Hypertension control rates are 32% in white adults, 25% in black adults, 19% in Asian adults, and 25% in Hispanic adults.There is a search to approach the ... Read More

Many factors contribute to the success of presidential candidates. Variations in racial diversity, immigrant demographics, and financial status have all been found to play a role in how any given community decides to cast their ballots. However, one factor that continues to be overlooked is the population of foreign-language speakers within a region. This study aims to find if that ... Read More

The Illinois State Treasurers Office is a state government agency responsible for the management and protection of state funds. The Illinois State Treasurers ensures the liquidity of all the state’s investments and aims to produce a consistent return on the state’s capital. Over the course of six months, the company provided numerous opportunities to work with employees and gain insight ... Read More

I used PYTHIA 8, a Monte Carlo generator for particle physics, to simulate lepton-jet-producing events. These lepton jets are produced by squarks which produce neutralinos which create dark photons that undergo a dark sector cascade decay into detectable lepton jets.

These events were examined for information about the particles that were produced. Triggers, which determine whether an event is recorded ... Read More

Out of all breast cancer (BC) cases, approximately 70% are estrogen-receptor-positive (ER+) which means that estrogen receptor (ER) is present in tumors and drives proliferation. As ER+ BC is reliant on ER for growth, development, and survival, targeting ER with drugs like tamoxifen suppresses its activity and reduces tumor growth. However, approximately 40% of women relapse. BC stem cells (BCSCs) ... Read More

We consider when a graded, self-dual Hopf algebra A = A ,

with graded isomorphisms Φ_n: A_n → A_n^* , has a self-dual basis. Motivated by the example of SSym over the reals, a self-dual algebra with no self-dual basis, we do this by analyzing the qualities of the map Φ_n. In particular, we have the general result that if ... Read More

Babl is an app that offers stories to aid children in speech therapy. The focus of the business project mainly consisted of creating stories to address the greatest speech concerns for children. Over the course of six months, the project allowed many opportunities to create imaginative stories as well as delve into the study of speech pathology. In the beginning, ... Read More

June’s Learning Laboratory (JLL) has developed a cultural competency curriculum to educate middle school students about the cultures and experiences of those around them and their role in the world. We will conduct research testing the effectiveness of this newly constructed curriculum by comparing the data collected from the surveys given to the participants before and after being taught the ... Read More

In the United States, gender roles have always played a large part in economic growth. However, to what extent do they still affect the modern world, and how does it affect financial wellbeing? This project will explore if there is a correlation between the ratio of women to men and average annual income on a county-level, and examine possible trends ... Read More

With our rapidly progressively aging society, neurodegenerative diseases including dementia have become one of the leading health challenges in our society. Significant advances have been made in our understanding of neuropathology and clinical manifestations of dementia. A vast amount of data has come from genetic, pathologic and molecular studies of brain samples from dementia patients and control subjects, however the ... Read More

Over the past few decades, one of the largest improvements in cancer therapeutic agents has been the use of mitotic poisons. However, as substantially effective as they are, mitotic poisons’ non-selective involvement in other pivotal physiologic processes entail the necessity of carrying out perturbations to novel components that are explicit to the cell cycle/division pathway. Chromosomal abnormalities, known as aneuploidy, ... Read More

Cities across the United States face severe challenges in housing all of their residents. Hundreds of thousands of people face homelessness throughout the US. It is well known and understood that there are four main contributing factors to homelessness: lack of affordable housing, unemployment, poverty, and mental illness and substance abuse. While these causes are well known, solutions vary wildly ... Read More

Approximately 70-80% of epilepsy cases are likely caused by genetic variants. Somatic variants are mutations with low allele fractions that occur in only a portion of a patient’s cells, often because of somatic mosaicism. Given these variants’ low read counts in sequenced DNA, they are frequently missed. In our project, we compared the sensitivity of variant callers, MuTect and Mosaic ... Read More

Emtricitabine is a drug used to treat Human Immunodeficiency Virus Infection by slowing the progression of the virus in the body. The goal of this study was to start with the structure of the drug emtricitabine and design new compounds to achieve a better binding affinity. By achieving a better binding affinity, the usefulness of the drug in the body ... Read More

Glioblastoma is the most common and aggressive primary brain tumor in adults. Defining histopathologic features are necrosis and endothelial proliferation, resulting in the assignment of grade IV, the highest grade in the World Health Organization (WHO) classification of brain tumors. The classic clinical term "secondary glioblastoma" refers to a minority of glioblastomas that evolve from previously diagnosed WHO grade II ... Read More

Encore Batavia is a social venture initiative launched in 2020 by founder, Britta McKenna, after her 2019 personal research, “69 Cups of Coffee: Caffeinated Insights About Batavia,” identified community needs. The goal of this internship was to address the following question: How do you create a brand manual using design thinking? The manual includes a variety of information regarding branding ... Read More

We present our work on the analysis of the cross-section for doubly-charged Higgs production from muon-muon collisions. To facilitate this, the researchers have been utilizing PYTHIA software to simulate these collisions. This analysis allows us to study the predicted results that can be obtained from an experimental muon collider, which has been a topic of interest scientifically for some time. ... Read More

The doubly charged Higgs is a scalar boson with +2 or -2 charge, characteristic of the left-right symmetric model. These particles are pair-produced in a quark-antiquark annihilation, and decay to two leptons (electrons, positrons, muons, or anti-muons) of the same charge. In a search for these doubly-charged Higgs, which decay rapidly, and therefore cannot be easily found by the detector, ... Read More

The usual drug development timeline has been substantially condensed as the number of global COVID cases rise in order to allow for a safe and effective therapy to be discovered as soon as possible. Moreover, the COVID Moonshot open-sourced initiative has allowed the development of a COVID antiviral to accelerate. After the published fragment screening on the main protease (MPro) ... Read More

The k-Schur functions can be defined using several different methods, including using k-tableaux, weak tableaux, and strong tableaux (Lam et. al. 2013). They can be generated by a function derived from the weak Pieri rule for Schur functions, by summing over k-bounded partitions. These k-Schur functions also reside in a subring of the symmetric functions. The dual k-Schur functions can ... Read More

Chronic pain is the most prevalent health condition in the United States, affecting over 116 million Americans, and therefore is the focus of many clinical trials. Studies on chronic pain treatment commonly report improvements in pain as a percent reduction from an initial value. Importantly percent reduction implies that improvements in pain are multiplicative. Although percent reductions are conceptually simple, ... Read More

Vaccine misinformation is widely disseminated on social media, and it is often difficult to correct. Social media posts that contain vaccine misinformation have been found to generate high engagement among social media users, and the spread of misinformation can be harmful to society. This project focuses on monitoring and analyzing sources and types of HPV vaccine misinformation on different social ... Read More

In the last few decades, more research has been conducted on bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria, and the potential of phage therapy to serve as an alternative to antibiotics. Because phage therapy has high specificity, lower chance of resistance, and minimal disturbance to “good” bacteria, it appears to be a worthy alternative. However, greater research must be conducted in order ... Read More

The Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE) is a neutrino experiment where neutrino beams from Fermilab are to be sent to liquid argon particle detectors at Sanford Underground Research Facility in South Dakota, approximately 1,300 kilometers away. Before the DUNE detectors could be built, a prototype of a single-phase (SP) time projection chamber (TPC) called ProtoDUNE was built. This is currently ... Read More

The intent of this project is to examine explicit and implicit biases within the United States law enforcement and justice systems and how they can be impacted by race. It shows differences in all aspects of life, including birth, socio-economic statuses, education, adulthood and death. Specifically, it will review data about government spending per state’s education spending, as well as ... Read More

The COVID-19 pandemic has had one of the greatest effects on educational institutions in recent history. With Classes becoming virtual and many activities not being possible because of CDC guidelines and social distancing, it is obvious that this pandemic has greatly changed students’ learning. One type of education has experienced some of the largest changes, Medical Education, as it is ... Read More

June’s Learning Laboratory (JLL) has developed a cultural competency curriculum to educate middle school students about the cultures and experiences of those around them and their role in the world. We will conduct research testing the effectiveness of this newly constructed curriculum by comparing the data collected from the surveys given to the participants before and after being taught the ... Read More

As global temperatures continue to rise, food security has become more of a problem for scientists to solve, and one approach is to improve photo-synthesis production in plants. Photosynthesis in many plant species is limited when temperatures increase past their optimal range. As a result, research has been geared toward how to improve Rubisco Activase (RCA), a key enzyme in ... Read More

Painful Diabetic Neuropathy (PDN) affects 25% of diabetic patients and is a chronic disorder with a major effect on quality of life and health care costs. It can be characterized by dorsal root ganglion (DRG) nociceptor hyperexcitability, calcium overload, axonal degeneration, and loss of cutaneous intervention. Currently, the molecular mechanisms contributing to neuropathic pain in PDN are still unclear. We ... Read More

Millions of people suffer from sleep apnea and resort to Continuous Positive Airway Pressure (CPAP) machines to provide relief while asleep. However, many experience discomfort and functionality issues with their standard equipment. The goal of the business project was to devise a personalized and 3D printable solution for current CPAP users that would improve compliance with their machines. To identify ... Read More

At CourseStars, I have been working with my business mentor to increase the overall efficiency of the company’s website on WIX over the past 5 months. More specifically, the focus of my project is to improve the tutor profile creation process. Before my internship, tutors had to fill out a google form with all their information, which had to be ... Read More