Session I

Mobile interventions created through research studies often have not focused on user preferences, and consequently, people are less likely to use the app once it enters the real world. FoodSteps is a mobile intervention to help users manage weight and reduce binge eating and was designed with extensive user input through user-centered design methods. In this

study, 30 people with ... Read More

The purpose of this project is to automatically generate background and signal estimates for the H++. Drell-Yan is one possible path of Higgs production, but 4 lepton production at 800 GeV is quite rare, meaning the data becomes sparse near 800 due to the low probability of events generating in that range. To calculate background in this case and gain ... Read More

BlockBins is a composting company that provides shared compost bins at low prices. The focus of the business project for BlockBins is to compile a detailed composting and recycling guide and to further solidify their brand image through social media presence. These projects have had many positive impacts. The compost guide gives BlockBins' target market important information which makes composting ... Read More

Atopic dermatitis (AD) is a non-contagious chronic inflammatory skin disease. AD is associated with allergies such as those that pertain to food or dust, allergic asthma, and anaphylaxis. These reactions start a complex interaction of various pathways involving skin barrier function and immune deviation, developing an itchy inflammation on the contacted skin. Topical treatments such as topical steroids and PDE4 ... Read More

In the United States, electricity production from fossil fuels accounts for nearly 25% of greenhouse emissions. The impact of this problem inspired us to construct a lightweight, compactable wind turbine that could give users renewable energy wherever they go. Our current design includes an 8.5 x 8.5 x 2-inch plastic base. This houses the electronics which include five small generators ... Read More

Our overall goal for this project is to assess the effectiveness of 3D printed fidget toys in the classroom as a method of cost effective classroom attentiveness management. Our goal this school year was to assess which 3D printable fidget toys, among those that are freely available online, were the most effective in terms of cost, material requirement, time to ... Read More

The rise of diabetes mellitus, particularly among younger people, has been a cause of public health concern recently. Many scientific studies conducted throughout the pandemic showed diabetes as being a cause for severe complications related to COVID. Current treatment for diabetes primarily consists of lifestyle changes and/or medications. Natural remedies for diabetes have been gaining more traction lately, given the ... Read More

Articular cartilage is a vital connective tissue in the musculoskeletal system. Because articular cartilage is avascular in nature, effective repair of cartilaginous defects remains a challenge. Dimension Inx (Chicago, IL), recently developed a novel ultraporous scaffold: Fluffy polylactide co-glycolide (FPLG). It is capable of being 3D printed to precisely adhere to irregular contours present in cartilaginous surfaces. This study evaluated ... Read More

The decay of the doubly charged Higgs is as follows: two quarks annihilate into a Z boson, which pair produces an H++ and H--, which both then decay into 4 final state leptons. We attempt to find more precise cuts to eliminate the most significant backgrounds – Drell-Yan, ZZ, ttbar, and QCD. We also calculate the significance. By predicting better ... Read More

Topological data analysis (TDA) is an approach to the analysis of datasets using techniques from topology. The main tool is persistent homology, an adaptation of homology to point cloud data. Persistent homology has been applied to many types of data across many fields. Until quite recently, the theoretical aspects of TDA and topological inference mostly relied on deterministic approaches. These ... Read More

Over the last few decades, research has been conducted on bacteriophages, viruses that infect bacteria, and the potential of phage therapy to serve as an alternative to antibiotics. Phage therapy has high specificity, lower chance of resistance, and minimal disturbance to “good” bacteria, making it a worthy alternative. However, more research is needed to identify candidates for phage therapy. This ... Read More

Access to health care impacts many people nationwide, as it restricts their ability to solve their health concerns. People who have the highest risk of a lack of access include people who are uninsured, people a part of a specific social class, a minority that lives in a poor state, or a person belonging to a specific political party. The ... Read More

While climate change threatens extreme weather events and rising ocean levels, its effects will also impact important pollinators that we rely on for crops and native ecosystems. While the larval stages are considered to be an agricultural pest, in their adult stage, the hawk moths are important pollinators, contributing heavily to healthy, native ecosystems in the Midwest. Temperature-induced changes in ... Read More

This project focuses on how adding various substituents to the already existing phenolmolecule will influence its structure and stability. Phenol is an antiseptic often found in household cleaners and is also used in small amounts as an anesthetic. 11 non-metal substituents are added within the para location to see whether or not the said substituent will affect the molecule. Our ... Read More

Mycetoma is a commonly neglected tropical disease that leads to the development of tumors that may affect underlying bone (CDC, 2020). By carrying on from graduated students’ research from the previous year, we have analyzed a compound, Methyl Ether 6, that they have deemed as potentially fit for the treatment of the disease. Enforcing Lipinski’s rule of 5 in combination ... Read More

There are many factors that can impact an individuals’ health, such as proximity to services, access to nature, occupational opportunities, and more. It was hypothesized that factors such as population density, education, civilian labor force, poverty, mortality, public transportation, air quality, and unemployment rates differ between urban and rural areas and influence longevity in humans. However, previous research dove deeper ... Read More

With no current vaccine for Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), it is crucial to study what factors influence how HIV infects host cells to develop new strategies and therapies to combat this pandemic. Cleavage and polyadenylation specificity factor 6 (CPSF6) is an HIV host factor known to influence HIV infectivity and trafficking early in the infection. We hypothesize that the overexpression ... Read More

Research shows that people with low incomes and racial/ethnic minority populations experience greater levels of stress than their more affluent, white counterparts. This can lead to significant disparities in both mental and physical health that ultimately affect life expectancy and shows correlation with a reduction in household SES as paired with mental and physical health barriers. To learn more about ... Read More

Chronic Rhinosinusitis (CRS) is a nasal disease characterized by the inflammation of the mucosa and paranasal sinuses with a duration of at least 12 consecutive weeks. So, to diagnose CRS, one needs to keep a record of their symptoms for ~12 weeks before they are recommended to get a tomography which will allow physicians to classify them as a patient ... Read More

The doubly charged Higgs boson (H^±±) is a theoretical non-Standard Model scalar boson with both Drell-Yan and vector boson fusion production mechanisms. The dark photon (γ_d) is a theoretical dark matter non-SM gauge boson in the dark sector with Higgs and SUSY production mechanisms. We present our findings on triboson background events for doubly charged

Higgs bosons and dark photons ... Read More

Motivated by applications as a kernel of nonlinear regression algorithms, the row-wise weighted total least squares regression problem is examined to find a consistent and accurate estimator. Specifically, the estimator will have a time complexity linear in the number of observations and a space complexity constant in the same value, as the number of observations can be quite large in ... Read More

Recently, the practice of patient-centered health care has emerged as one possible strategy to reduce health disparities experienced by marginalized communities. Despite this trend, limited research has been conducted to measure the impact of patient-centered health care, or identity and gender-affirming care, on members of the LGBTQ+ community and potential improvements.

This study first analyzed differences in participants’ responses to ... Read More

In-the-current standard-of-care mechanism for donor heart transport, the organ is immersed in preservation solution inside of a sterile plastic jar, triple-bagged, and placed inside a cooler filled with ice. Literature describing the relationship between transport conditions and post-transplant outcomes is very limited. Therefore, we aimed to investigate the relationship of donor heart temperature with major elements of post-transplant success.

This ... Read More

The development of effective antiviral drugs for COVID-19 is ongoing. COVID Moonshot is an initiative that contributes to this goal. We aim to develop easily manufacturable antiviral drugs that can inhibit the SARS-CoV-2 main protease, Mpro. Using fragment-based drug discovery, which identifies low-molecular-weight ligands that bind to biologically important macromolecules, leads for the biological target were identified. We designed new ... Read More

We look through data generated from a Monte-Carlo simulation in order to analyze exotic interactions, meaning those outside of the standard model. Our analysis is divided into two primary searches, with one focused on the doubly-charged Higgs boson, and the other examining dark photon decay. This project focused primarily on the dark photons, specifically the lepton jets that result from ... Read More

Across the United States, there is a twenty-year life expectancy difference between the county with the highest longevity and the county with the lowest longevity (USC). Income is a major factor with wealthier regions having some of the highest longevity. However, there are many more external factors, especially those relating to healthcare, that shorten the longevity of those residing in ... Read More

AgInvest is a program developed by the Illinois State Treasurers Office that streamlines the process that banks go through to request loans on behalf of farmers. It has been available for Illinois for over 39 years. It provided basic loans with a variety of approved financial institutions to start, expand, or addvalue to farm operations. It has loaned billions of ... Read More

Breast cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death in women. Triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) is an aggressive subclass defined by its lack of hormonal receptors and HER2 amplification. Although TNBC only accounts for 15% of all invasive breast cancers, there are limited therapeutic options for patients with TNBC. Although breast cancer patients have a favorable prognosis if ... Read More

Leishmaniasis is a parasitic disease that is characterized by fevers, enlarged spleens, weight loss, and swollen glands. It primarily affects the tropical and subtropical regions of Earth, and is also classified as a neglected tropical disease. This study was done in collaboration with the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative (DNDi) and the University of Otago. The goal of this project ... Read More

Current models occasionally misinterpret particle charges due to high transverse momentum. To this end, we designed a module that, when implemented, matches generated particles to reconstructed ones and logs the number of incorrect signs in the reconstruction. We further divide these sign flips between high pT and low pT, based off a momentum cut specified in the module. Further, our ... Read More

My SIR project analyzes the ways in which race intersects with and determines postgraduate success of young adults in the U.S. Previously, I studied the ways that Affirmative Action, Affirmative Action Bans, HBCUs and other factors affect the overall percentage of African American Students (Black) attending 4-year public institutions in America. I found that most of these variables had no ... Read More

We present an architecture for learning semantic multi-modal video representations to learn semantic representations of videos from unlabeled data with transformer architectures. While multi-modal transformer architectures have been shown to increase accuracy of video classification and feature learning tasks, these techniques do not incorporate semantic information. Our Semantic Contrastive Multi-Modal Video Transformer (SCMMVT) takes raw video, audio, and text data ... Read More

Tiopronin is a prescription thiol drug used as medication to treat severe homozygous cystinuria. Although not an immediate threat it contains the risk of the formation of kidney stones. Tiopronin is used as a second-line therapy to control the rate of cysteine precipitation and excretion. The price of tiopronin has recently exploded from $1.50 to $30 per pill, a 1,900% ... Read More

After noting a lack of engagement and representation on the IMSA YouTube channel and researching existing science content, we produced an educational video segment for the channel about the brain, based on student surveys. After capturing analytics before and after, we analyzed the change in the channel and denoted this change to the topic, format, and production of our content. ... Read More

Vitamin D has been proven to have anti-proliferative effects on several different types of cancer, including Glioblastoma multiforme (GBM). The use of supplemental Vitamin D has demonstrated a reduced mortality rate in GBM patients, and the expression of the Vitamin D Receptor may be associated with a better prognosis for GBM patients. To further establish the tumoricidal efficacy of Vitamin ... Read More

STI-571’s role in the medical field is not as significant as other proteins, so we are interested in the logistics of its interaction with amino acids, such as Threonine. We applied the SPARTAN software to model the STI-571 molecule and Thr. We then made atomic substitutions, including changing a few Nitrogen atoms to Carbon atoms. Despite such changes, the distance ... Read More

Studies have been conducted to determine the role overlapping resonances have on the chaos within planetary systems, primarily our own. Most studies prove that overlapping resonances are the cause of chaotic orbits, as is evidenced by the Kirkwood gaps, however, it is not understood which resonances are primarily responsible for chaotic orbits. Our project investigates the relationships of overlapping first-order ... Read More

TurnUp Activism Inc. is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that strives to foster a new wave of youth voters and activists. In the TurnUp app, users are able to find and post events, scroll through their newsfeed, access resources, and participate in civic engagement. On their social media platforms, TurnUp posts about volunteer opportunities, current news, and other resources, and during my ... Read More

Design Thinking is a problem solving process used for innovation and when creating something new. A five step iterative process - empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test - it allows designers to make successful products that satisfy user needs. In this project we explore the process of design thinking through different lenses and contexts. The first context was an environmental setting ... Read More

We are utilizing the program SOFTSUSY (based on the minimal supersymmetric standard model (mssm)) for dark sector analysis of dark photons. We have automated the external program with Python to give us cross-sections of dark photons while also automating the C++ graphing program to plot these data points. The two variables that are changed throughout automation are the m0 (unified ... Read More

The Shinnery Oak (Quercus havardii) is a low clonal deciduous shrub native to the Great Plains of North America. Little research has been done on the disappearing specie’s ecology as the Shinnery Oak undesirably dominates the vegetation growing in its environment. Nonetheless, the species’ restoration is vital to biodiversity, the well being of endangered species in the community, and livestock ... Read More

We present quantification of the potential to detect dark photons through Higgs portal decays to dark fermion pairs, as first analyzed in 2016 by ATLAS. The Higgs portal is one of two potential decay patterns under study: through further simulation we can compare it with a theorized supersymmetric (SUSY) portal and determine differences in lepton jets generated through the two ... Read More

The purpose of this research paper is to identify the role of the racial makeup in American public schools has on educational outcomes. Current literature explains how low socioeconomic and academic resources create a negative compounded effect. Due to systematic disadvantages, minorities are less likely to graduate from high school and attend college. This project hypothesizes that even when controlling ... Read More

Data augmentation is an important component in the robustness evaluation of models in natural language processing (NLP) and in enhancing the diversity of the data they are trained on. In this paper, we present NL-Augmenter, a new participatory Python-based natural language augmentation framework which supports the creation of both transformations (modifications to

the data) and filters (data splits according to ... 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. With COVID-19, the search for designing effective online learning tools has become more important than ever. Also, because students in higher education are more ... Read More

In the field of drug discovery, the use of small molecule inhibitors have become a prevalent strategy when developing drugs. In the p53-MDM2 protein-protein interaction, many novel small molecule inhibitors in the past 10 years have entered clinical trials to inhibit this protein interaction. There are many different types of small molecule inhibitors for this inhibitor such as MDMX or ... Read More

Particle physics research involves processing up to millions of simulated particle collision events under a variety of conditions. These events are contained in Root files, and efficiently accessing these files is a crucial first step in the whole IMSA-CMS analysis. In our framework, the locations of the Root files corresponding to a condition are stored in text files, and the ... Read More

The prognosis for patients with Glioblastoma multiforme is about 6% within 5 years of diagnosis. However, if caught earlier, the astrocytes that form glioblastoma can be detected in order to treat and prevent the spread of the cancer. This makes the use of biomarkers useful for diagnosis and tracking the progression of Glioblastoma multiforme. ELISA tests were done to test ... Read More

Our goal is to engineer a system for expressing Rubisco Activase variants from the chloroplast genome in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. We can characterize the effects of these variants on assimilation and cell growth at various temperatures. Ultimately, this system will enable directed evolution of RCA isoforms for improved thermotolerance. To do this, we have built plasmids with several different promoters using ... 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

We present results of new selection cuts in doubly charged Higgs to WW events. This search is performed using data generated from Monte Carlo simulations using leading lepton transverse momentum, same-sign invariant mass, opposite-sign invariant mass, and missing transverse energy. Monte Carlo simulations about each of these properties were analyzed for each significant background of the doubly charged Higgs: QCD ... Read More

Antibodies play a critical role in the immune system to recognize and defend the body from antigens. While most antibodies bind to one unique antigen due to the affinity maturation process, some antibodies bind with low affinity to multiple unrelated antigens, which is termed polyreactivity. In serum, there are many different polyreactive antibodies, of which have different affinities. Thus, using ... Read More

We present new selection cuts for doubly charged Higgs bosons decaying into tau particles. The variables of the data include the leading lepton transverse momentum, same-sign invariant mass, opposite-sign invariant mass, and missing transverse energy values of each interaction. We also collect these values from data on each of the significant background events for the doubly charged Higgs decaying into ... Read More

Numerous studies have indicated an association between vitamin D deficienc and the immune dysregulation and pathogenesis of autoimmunity. This study was undertaken to determine the prevalence of vitamin D deficiency in children with PANS, an autoimmune disorder characterized by abrupt-onset neuropsychiatric symptoms. A retrospective chart review of 122 pediatric PANS patients at a single treatment center was performed. Data collected ... Read More

Antifungal therapy against eumycetoma, the fungal form of the infectious disease known as Mycetoma, has shown to be less than 27% effective, leading to the need for amputations and frequent surgeries. To find methods to control the predominant causative agent, Madurella mycetomatis, the crowdsourced MycetOS project was created with the intention of taking advantage of online communication between researchers. In ... Read More

Fungal mycetoma is a neglected tropical disease that destroys skin, subcutaneous, and bone tissues in the limbs, causing deformity and physical disability. The disease spreads after contamination of wounds, typically on the feet or legs of a patient. There are over 70 identified fungal species that can cause fungal mycetoma after infecting humans. The disease is most prevalent in arid, ... Read More

After brain injury, increased levels of monoamines in the central nervous system may result in hypertonia, or increased muscle tone on the affected side. The purpose of this project is to determine how low levels of cutaneous electrical stimulation affect hypertonia in patients with chronic hemiparetic stroke.

Electromyography (EMG) data was collected from the biceps, lateral triceps, and brachioradialis muscles ... Read More

The prevalence of antibiotic-resistant infectious diseases has been on the rise, staging a major threat to the key role antibiotics play a key role in disease management. This global public health problem has reignited many discussions of finding new antibiotic resistance genes, revealing antimicrobial impacts and potential of soil bacteria in fighting these pathogens. Antibiotic residues in soil vary depending ... Read More

In a collider, particle collisions create around 2TB of data every second, with most of this data being useless to the actual study. To help sift through this data on the fly, “triggers” are used to quickly determine what events should be recreated and kept, based on several parameters. In the IMSA-CMS framework we used predetermined triggers alongside our own ... Read More

Continuous Positive Airway Pressure (CPAP) machines offer relief to millions of people suffering from sleep apnea and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). However, more than a third of CPAP users stop using their equipment due to compliance issues such as discomfort and air leakage. The goal of the business project was to devise a solution that would address these issues ... Read More