Session II

Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi (AMF) is a type of soil fungus that forms a symbiotic relationship with plant roots to assist the plant with gathering nutrients throughout the soil and managing water stress. We compared the AMF communities of an abandoned field inside the Morton Arboretum between 2016 and 2021 to determine if the addition of native tallgrass prairie plants, a ... Read More

First-generation college student status is yet another identity that contributes to postsecondary performance of an individual in the United States. Though enrollment of first-generation college students has substantially increased in the past years, the populace is still privy to vulnerabilities concerning successful performance within and post collegiate studies. Typically, American society tends to consider first-generation college students as part of ... Read More

The Representative Barbara Hernandez works at the state level, listening to suggestions from her constituents in the 83rd District and enacting them through legislation. To do so, the Call to Action Campaign was launched to bring more awareness and urgency to the legislation she is proposing so that they will eventually get passed. The legislative Call to Action Campaign is ... Read More

Astrocytes are one of the most abundant cell types in the central nervous system (CNS), playing an important role in regulating the environment by participating in glutamate uptake, immunoinflammatory response of the CNS, and supporting the blood brain barrier (BBB). Sourcing a consistent supply of primary astrocytes for in vitro experiments is vital to understanding their role in CNS health ... Read More

Though it is generally believed that the first coins of ancient Athens, the Wappenmünzen (“heraldic coins”), were first minted in the mid-sixth century BCE, the historical context within which they emerged remains unclear. Most modern numismatists agree that they were minted under the authority of the tyrant Peisistratus. With what metal the coins were minted, by whom, and for what ... Read More

There is no drug on the market that successfully “cures” HIV, which leaves millions of people in an endless cycle of symptom suppressing drugs. The goal of this research project was to design and synthesize a better and more efficient medication starting from an already existing drug on the market: atazanavir. Using a program called SeeSAR to modify the structure ... Read More

This project is a continuation of a project of the same name from the previous year. Last year’s project failed to find correlations between the effects of the pandemic and trends in Freedom Scores, as measures by Freedom House’s Freedom in the World (FIW) index. However, given that the pandemic continues to change in its nature, and given that more ... Read More

Artificial Intelligence-based analysis techniques have struggled to make headway in the field of neurological analysis. However, the systems that have been successfully implemented have shaped our modern understanding of neurological interactions. These analysis techniques are largely limited by a lack of robust frameworks for data generation and application, especially with relation to applications that require the usage of large datasets. ... Read More

Water purification remains one of the permeating questions for humanity throughout history as humans’ need to consume clean water to satisfy their bodily needs hasn’t matched up well with the type of water present on Earth in large quantities as roughly only 1.2 % is safe for human consumption. In recent years, with the continued development of technology, experiments have ... Read More

This year, my research has focused on optimizing Dark Photon and QCD datasets by comparing characteristic variables to exclude virtual jets. The bulk of my work has been in deep learning, where I am using Root's TMVA library to create layered neural networks to distinguish between dark photons and other potential sources of particles. In the broader perspective, by selecting ... Read More

Cancer is a leading cause of death worldwide and the second leading cause of death in the United States, and the primary cause of mortality is metastasis to other organs. The perinucleolar compartment (PNC) is a sub-nucleolar structure that has been associated with metastasis and the progression of cancer, resulting in poor patient outcomes. To combat metastatic cancer, look towards ... Read More

The existence of the dark photon is predicted by several theories beyond the standard model. In this study, we analyze particles in the dark photon’s decay pattern, specifically lepton jets, to prove or disprove the existence of the dark photon. The number of lepton jets found and the number of recognized jets that are matched to an underlying neutralino depend ... Read More

The intention of this molecular modeling chemistry project was to minimize harmful emissions from the common explosives trinitrotoluene (TNT) and composition-4 (C4). The explosives were modeled in Spartan, a molecular modeling software that allows for a variety of molecular calculations. Exothermic activation energy calculations were completed to understand initial energies required in the explosions and visualize how those energies fluctuate ... Read More

Histone modifications are essential in regulating chromatin function and structure. Abnormal histone methylation is often detected during tumor development and progression. NSD1, NSD2, and NSD3 are key histone methyltransferases (HMTs) that catalyze lysine 36 dimethylation (K36me2) at histone H3. Inactivating NSD1 mutations are frequent in head neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) commonly occur in HPV-negative oropharyngeal (OP) carcinoma and laryngeal ... Read More

In preclinical animal data, rodents that show a high locomotor activity response (HR) in a novel environment are more sensitive to rewarding drugs than those with a low locomotor response (LR). Thus, locomotor response to novelty is suggested to reflect trait sensation seeking in humans which is also positively related to drug reward. This study investigates whether the preclinical data ... Read More

Natural Remedies for Glioblastoma Multiforme (GBM) Glioblastoma multiforme, commonly known as GBM, is a form of the brain with uncontrollable cell growth. For the past few decades, there have been many attempts to find a working or reliable cure to reduce the effects of this tumor, but nothing has been successful. As a result, many of those affected turn to ... Read More

According to research by Steinhauser et. al, inattention of the driver due to additional tasks, emotion changes, fatigue or eye movements played an important role in 78% of car accidents on the road. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that at least 100,000 police-reported crashes are the direct result of driver fatigue each year. This equates to approximately 1,550 ... Read More

Antibiotic resistance is growing globally, making it necessary for new antibiotics to be discovered. Major pharmaceutical companies have stopped antibiotic discovery, claiming a lack of profitability, so academic institutions are crowd-sourcing this work. We started our research by collecting soil from environments stressful for bacterial survival. We performed a serial dilution of the soil in water to dislodge bacteria from ... Read More

For several years, the novel virus known as SARS-CoV-2 has been causing infections throughout the world, resulting in many seriously ill patients, and even numerous deaths. A consortium called COVID Moonshot was created in response to the virus, and it aims to crowdsource designed molecules from across the world to test for potential antivirals. Through the use of programs such ... Read More

A significant worry for a new mother is ensuring the baby is happy and healthy. Taking care of aninfant can be quite challenging and knowing when and how to feed them is another obstacle. To make sure a baby is healthily growing, the baby needs to be fed. The main objective of our internship project was to create resources for ... Read More

Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis (IPF) is a lung disease with a mean survival of 2-5 years from the time of diagnosis in which alveolar tissue progressively becomes stiff fibrotic scar tissue, reducing breathing capacity and eventually leading to respiratory failure. The use of Machine Learning could predict IPF cases more precisely than the current surgical lung biopsy treatment years before the ... Read More

Herpes Simplex Virus Type 2 (HSV-2) is one of the most widespread sexually transmitted infections in the world today, infecting more than 500 million people worldwide. In a recent article, we showed that OPTN, a gene that codes for the Optineurin protein, selectively marks essential HSV proteins for degradation in an autophagy-dependent manner and that an essential chemokine, CCL5, positively ... Read More

The Burrowing Owl of California has been noted as a species of concern regarding the development of solar energy facilities in their habitat. Successful conservation planning requires a deep understanding of the species’ population dynamics. This knowledge is scattered throughout studies and a singular model regarding the owl’s life history does not exist. Thus, we developed a conceptual life history ... Read More

We are working on the simulated generation of the dark photon with a Z’ portal. We currently have the generation of dark photons through a SUSY model, so to explore the behavior of other production channels in our search for dark photons, we are using the Z’ portal. With the Pythia 8.3 application, we are generating these particles using a ... Read More

The project identifies how the Chicago Public School System (CPS) unequally distributes resources among schools and neighborhoods within Chicago. This analysis is done using traditional data science programs such as Microsoft Excel functions, Python, and R. In the various analyses that have been conducted, we have compiled data from publicly accessible datasets FOIA’ed from CPS; including the distribution of library ... Read More

Emtricitabine is a drug used to treat Human Immunodeficiency Virus Infection by slowing the progression of the virus in the body. Previously, a compound with a better binding affinity that was designed using computer aided drug design was found. The goal of this study is to synthesize the compound in the lab and test the product produced. The chemical synthesis ... Read More

This talk will discuss a major overhaul of our data analysis architecture which permits the use of multiple file types. The code we use to work with particle physics datasets previously only worked when those datasets were written in MiniAOD format. After the overhaul, the code can be easily made to run on any file format, including DELPHES which was ... Read More

Ancestral sequence reconstruction, commonly abbreviated as ASR, is a method used to estimate the sequence and properties of an extinct organism’s genes. Exploring ancestral sequences has shown the possibility of resurrecting ancient genes for use in current research. Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, or CRISPR, is used in prokaryotes as their antiviral system. Cas9, an enzyme associated with CRISPR, ... Read More

The doubly charged Higgs boson is a theoretical particle that coulexist but has never been found. The Higgs Combine Tool (HCT) is a tool that uses Bayesian statistics to calculate limits based on particle accelerator data. I used 3000 inverse femtobarns of data which is the expected amount for the HL-LHC upgrade. I created text files that I fed into ... Read More

In the past couple of decades, the stances on the perfect truss structure have been widely varied, with new studies popping up every couple of years using new modeling techniques to prove one hypothesis or another. Sometimes, the need for simplicity is a dire one, and research focused on the best structure for a simple bridge is very limited. We ... Read More

Cisplatin is a platinum-based chemotherapy drug used to treat various types of cancers, including sarcomas, some carcinomas (i.e. small cell lung cancer, and ovarian cancer), lymphomas and germ cell tumors (DrugBank, 2021). Cisplatin can cause hearing loss in the cochlea, which is a result of some of the cancer therapies that happen in hospitals. In this study three experimental groups ... Read More

Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites orbit earth and store positional information that is relayed to receivers on earth. Disruptions in the signal can result in changes in the amplitude and phase of the radio waves. These disruptions can be a result of an atmospheric phenomena known as scintillation, which is caused by plasma particles in the atmosphere interacting with the ... Read More

Global warming is a pressing problem in the world today and it is exacerbated by the release of greenhouse gases, such as methane, into the atmosphere. Zeolites are being examined as a potential solution to the methane problem because they have a unique structure that can trap molecules. In particular, zeolites containing transitional metals show promise in oxidization reactions. Methane ... Read More

This study strives to create an online STEM curriculum for the children in developing countries, specifically Uganda by evaluating and making a personalized curriculum for the child to train their skills to pursue their career in STEM at a young age. The curriculum consists of different modules, which include videos and quizzes for each lesson, and a few content related ... Read More

Cystinuria is a medical condition in which stones that are composed of an amino acid called Cysteine are found strictly in the bladder, kidney, and ureter. Said condition is controlled through a medication documented as tiopronin; however after Thiola, the most common anaccessible brand, raised prices by 2900%, it became virtually impossible to afford. This study works through the synthesis ... Read More

Our research investigates C-V2X networking, an LTE-based technology that enables communication from vehicles to infrastructure (stoplights, crosswalks, etc), pedestrians, and other vehicles without the use of network towers. Using the network, vehicles are able to communicate Basic Safety Messages (BSMs). BSMs communicate a car’s speed, velocity, position, and other information detailing a vehicle's state and path. By efficiently communicating BSMs, ... Read More

This project builds off of the results of “The Impact of Women on Annual Household Income per County” (Sirais & Venkatraman 2021), which explored the ways that gender roles affected financial wellbeing. The study will explore possible correlations between marital status and average annual household income on a county-level. By compiling datasets from the United States census, the project will ... Read More

Use immunofluorescence microscopy and knockdown nucleolar proteins that inhibit certain nucleolar structures to determine whether the nucleolus influences differentiation in keratinocyte cells.

Keratinocytes are structures in the human epidermis that highlight the differences between the basal and surface layers of the skin. In a small area, all stages of cell differentiation can be observedin a single keratinocyte sample. Throughout cellular ... Read More

Asgard Data is a data analysis-focused company that helps specifically non-profits derive meaning from their data. The focus of the business project surrounded the most effective ways to analyze data, aid in website design, and explore the structure of small businesses and their needs.

Over the past six months, the company benefited through the implementation of various updates to the ... Read More

The same sign invariant mass histograms, produced from running simulated proton-proton collisions that produce doubly charged Higgs bosons samples, are unexpectedly skewed. While it was expected that the graphs would have a clean spike at 800 GeV, they had long tails on the right and left sides. The goal of the analysis was to use different methods to include final ... Read More

One of the longest-standing fundamental questions in physics is the nature of dark matter. Galactic rotation curves, gravitational lensing, cosmic microwave background, and galaxy cluster collisions have all supported the existence of a large invisible matter component to the universe since 1933 and Zwicky's early observations of objects at the edge of the Coma cluster.

To address this problem, the ... Read More

Legged locomotion on soft-ground is essential to designing robots for tasks such as disaster relief and extraterrestrial exploration where the ground may be yielding instead of rigid. In order to have successful legged locomotion on soft-ground, as much energy as possible needs to be conserved. This project aims to conserve this energy by minimizing the penetration depth of a robot ... Read More

With the rise in cases of SARS-CoV-2, it is imperative to discover a drug—in this case, an oral drug—to combat the virus’s ability to swiftly replicate. Fragment-based drug discovery provides a useful starting point in regards to the design of inhibitors rather than utilizing larger molecules. Due to the small size of these fragments, they can bind themselves to the ... Read More

Body posture involves multiple aspects of the body with standing, sitting, and walking being major factors contributing to an individual’s posture. Bent or slouched posture often leads to various negative health issues such as back pain, joint degeneration, and spinal dysfunction. Within the medical field, surgeons often spend hours in awkward positions while operating which leads to long-term poor spinal ... Read More

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the usual drug development timeline has been substantially condensed. This shortened timeline aims to facilitate the discovery of a safe and effective therapy as soon as possible, as the number of global COVID cases rise. Moreover, the COVID Moonshot open-sourced initiative facilitates the accelerated development of a COVID antiviral. After the published fragment screening on the ... Read More

We study lepton selection for dark photon events using simulated Monte Carlo events, for application in the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment. We find the optimal filters and cuts to limit background events while maintaining the amount of signal events. The types of background were QCD, Drell-Yan, tt̅, diboson, and triboson. The types of filters implemented were based on invariant mass, ... Read More

Polymers such as polystyrene, polyvinyl chloride (PVC), and nylon are very useful materials; they’re used in everything from packaging to piping to other everyday plastics. Every polymer is made up of many, many monomers stitched together to make a new substance. Their syntheses are very elaborate processes and are made up of multiple steps. The step to focus on is ... Read More

Pharmacogenomics is being increasingly used to guide certain clinical prescription decisions and will feed into future precision medicine applications. However, current pharmacogenetics (PGx) studies (and thus, the clinical guidelines coming out of PGx studies) are done predominantly using subjects of European descent and thus not representative of the human population. CYP function can be very different between ethnicities, and thus ... Read More

This analysis focuses on automating the generation of dark photon samples and generating background plots for dark photons. The current CRAB sample generation takes in a dataset name, generator fragment, the number of events, and the number of jobs to split the events up into. To generate the samples to be used in our analyses, the GEN, SIM, DIGIPremix, HLT, ... Read More

Though Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs) are not uncommon, they remain a taboo topic in many American families. Unfortunately, the stigma surrounding STDs often leads to deficient knowledge about them. The incorporation of STDs, their causes, and their treatment into education is a crucial component for teenagers to make healthy decisions regarding their lives and health. However, not all states require ... Read More

The elderly population is disproportionately affected by Alzheimer’s disease, which is observed cognitively. Using a set of next-generation RNA sequencing project (ROSMAP) from NorthShore University HealthSystem combined with clinical diagnostic profiles, we constructed a neural network-based deep learning model to predict the occurrence and severity of three geriatric-related pathological features. The final consensus cognitive diagnosis (cogdx) was taken post-mortem. Braak ... Read More

The initial site for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection is the upper respiratory system. In many patients, however, the virus finds a way to reach the lungs, which can result in serious infection. Coronavirus can also spread to various parts of the body causing multiorgan failure. Although over 80% of patients with severe COVID-19 demonstrate neurological symptoms, ... Read More

During the course of this research project, we study how children of young ages solve simple math problems, along with identifying their exact thought process and ideas. One of the prominent things researchers observe are gestures. What is it about gesturing that makes it such an effective tactic for mankind? Why is gesturing so prominent in human nature? In order ... Read More

Alzheimer’s disease, a form of dementia that declines cognitive function, is one of the world’s most prevalent diseases, currently with no cure discovered. Many drug therapies for the treatment of Alzheimer’s are centered around the cholinergic hypothesis, which states that the decrease of acetylcholine (ACh), a crucial neurotransmitter, is the start of the development of Alzheimer’s. To counter this, most ... Read More