Session III

First launched in 2009, NASA's Kepler Space Telescope was sent to discover Earth-sized planets orbiting other stars. Since then, several methods for searching for these planets have developed, one of which is the transit method. Using host star light curves, transits can be defined as dips in the light curve that indicate when the planet's orbit has crossed in front ... Read More

As global temperatures continue to rise, food security has become an increasingly relevant problem growing out of maintaining crop yield under adverse environments, and one approach is to improve photosynthesis activity in plants. Photosynthesis in many plant species is limited when ambient temperatures increase past their optimal range. As a result, our research aims to explore and improve the performance ... Read More

In the modern day, Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) have been recently used and tested to calculate and predict options pricing [Ke 2019], but currently, the most tested and reliable methods are the Binomial and Trinomial methods. Binomial and trinomial pricing models are valuation methods for financial derivatives, namely, options. The methods create a binomial or trinomial tree through an iterative ... Read More

Easily accessible water quality data is crucial in showing how local water supplies may be impacting public health and the environment for communities around the world. This project takes on the critical tasks of collecting, storing, managing, analyzing, and publishing water quality data from the Kishwaukee River Water Quality Assessment Study in DeKalb, Illinois using mWater, a robust online platform ... Read More

Dramatically expanding our ability for clinical genetic testing for inherited conditions and complex diseases such as cancer, next generation sequencing (NGS) technologies are allowing for rapid interrogation of thousands of genes and identification of millions of variants. Variant annotation, the process of assigning functional information to DNA variants based on the standardized Human Genome Variation Society (HGVS) nomenclature, is a ... Read More

Ulcerative colitis (UC) is a type of chronic inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), where deregulated immune responses promote exacerbated inflammation and formation of ulcers in the large intestine. IBD is also one of the high-risk factors for the development of colorectal cancer (CRC). Robust neutrophil infiltration is an important feature of both UC and CRC and in both cases, disease severity ... Read More

In the mouse brain, there are 59 retinorecipient regions, including the medial amygdala (MeA). The MeA is a sensory integrating region where social information is processed, especially those related to sexual selection, aggression, and pup retrieval. The neurons that link visual input to the brain are known as retinal ganglion cells (RGCs). There are ~47 mouse RGC subtypes, each with ... Read More