Session I

Congenital mental disorders, such as schizophrenia and major depressive disorder, affect approximately 20% of the US population. Research in clinical psychiatry, brain development, and medical genetics has established causal links between the nature of genetic backgrounds to the firing pattern of different types of neurons in the brain, which, in turn, leads to the psychopathological symptoms documented in clinical settings. ... Read More

Necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC) is a disease that affects the intestines, primarily in prematurely-born newborns. NEC is the death of intestinal tissue following inflammation and infection. It is likely caused by the immaturity of the intestines and the growth of dangerous bacteria. The current treatments for NEC include both natural treatments and antibiotic treatments. One natural treatment people frequently use is ... Read More

Dark photons are useful indicators to explain important phenomena beyond the Standard Model of particle physics, namely in the context of many experiments: dark matter. Dark photons can interact with Standard Model particles through a process called kinetic mixing, which allows them to decay into Standard Model leptons, from which lepton jets are produced. The area of interest in these ... Read More

A comprehensive list of Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO) terms capturing a patient’s phenotypic features is essential for the creation of a prioritized gene list for whole exome and whole genome sequencing (WES/WGS) analysis. However, the conversion of a patient’s clinical notes into HPO terms is inefficient, requiring human intervention, and introduces subjectivity. In this study, we evaluated the performance of ... Read More

One of the greatest dangers to the environment is industrial waste, in particular, polystyrene (PS). Zophobas morio, commonly referred to as superworms, have the ability to break down polystyrene plastics. In this study, we investigate the suitability of Z. morio as a bioremediation organism. Three sets of 100 superworms were separated into three terrariums containing a normal diet (oats, apples, ... Read More

Internal combustion engines are ubiquitous, but other types can be more effective in certain circumstances. Stirling engines can be a low-cost, non-polluting alternative. Our study focused on finding the optimal phase angle of a gamma-type Stirling engine to improve its efficiency and make it more competitive. Our tests consisted of setting the phase angle of the engine, placing it on ... Read More

Neelyx Labs is a highly innovative research and development company that seeks alternative methods to COVID testing. Our team of highly skilled and experienced scientists, engineers, and researchers is dedicated to creating cutting-edge solutions that can address some of the most pressing problems facing society today. Over the past several months, we have had the opportunity to collaborate with Neelyx ... Read More

NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope was designed to determine the frequency of Earth-sized planets within our galaxy. Using planetary transits accessed from Kepler lightcurve data, one can use a transit detection algorithm to find simulated transits to determine how accurate the algorithm will be against non-simulated data. We used the data from these light curves and applied parameters of temperature, orbital ... Read More

The mission of the Center of Innovation and Inquiry is to uplift students by launching ground-breaking projects into the global arena and providing experiences that are applicable, collaborative, and culturally sensitive on a global scale. During my year-long internship at the Center of Innovation and Inquiry under the guidance of Steve Goldblatt, I had the opportunity to work on several ... Read More

In a 2015 study, particle physicists reported the first observed seasonal variation of multiple muon events in the MINOS Far and Near Detectors, where multiple muon events created by cosmic rays were observed to be more numerous in the winter than in the summer. This goes against researchers’ initial hypothesis, because it has long been measured that single muon rates ... Read More

In this project, we aim to programmatically find the most efficient triggers for selecting H++ events for application in the Compact Muon Solenoid experiment. Highly efficient triggers are defined as those with high signal efficiency and low background efficiency to give as much signal and as little background as possible. The types of events analyzed were H++, Drell-Yan, and QCD. ... Read More

We modeled the binding of a segment of gastric carcinoma to the polymer segment (2E,4R,5S)-2,3,4,5-tetrahydroxy-6-(palmitoyloxy)hex-2-enoic acid using SPARTAN Student v9. Our aim is to provide more data to the drug industry on how gastric carcinoma binds to molecular strands and, by analogy, real proteins. When producing drugs for different diseases, scientists can save time and resources using modeling software because ... Read More

The Sharkovsky ordering of the natural numbers is 3 ≻ 5 ≻ 7 ≻ ... ≻ 2·3 ≻ 2·5 ≻ 2·7 ≻ ...... ≻ 22·3 ≻ 22·5 ≻ 22·7 ≻ ... ≻ 23 ≻ 22 ≻ 2 ≻ 1. Sharkovsky proved that if m comes before n in this ordering and a continuous map f: R → R has a ... Read More

Heat shock proteins (HSPs) are a group of proteins involved in protecting cells from damage. HSP70 is a type of HSP that is found in high levels in various types of cells, playing an important role in the regulation of protein folding, stabilization, and the prevention of protein aggregation. Recent research has suggested that the expression of is reduced in ... Read More

With the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), research must be conducted on how compatible human-autonomy teams truly are. This relationship can be measured qualitatively through a social network analysis of interactions between groups of up to nine humans and one robot, named Vero, working collaboratively to complete practical and creative tasks under a time constraint. Network ties are drawn based ... Read More

4170 Trading, a proprietary trading firm based in Chicago, primarily transacts in fixed-income cash, futures, and options markets with both actively managed and algorithmic trading strategies. The business project dwells on three major topics which were web development, data analysis, and financial modeling. Using these topics we created a web application modeling crucial financial information as requested by the traders ... 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 proposed estimator has 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

The transition to a sustainable bioeconomy is critical for achieving decarbonization, reducing dependence on non-renewable resources, and decreasing greenhouse gas emissions. This project aims to achieve the following: i) evaluate the environmental and economic impacts of bioprocesses using BioSTEAM, a python platform and ii) investigate capacitive deionization as an alternative strategy for industrial separations. BioSTEAM is a free, open-source platform ... Read More

Mega-Constellations are interconnected webs of thousands of satellites that deliver high-speed wireless communication to ground station clients. Major corporations, such as SpaceX and Amazon, utilize mega-constellations stationed at various altitudes in Low Earth Orbit (LEO). In recent years, the number of LEO satellites in orbit has greatly increased, resulting in conflicting bandwidth usage. Any such overlaps between various mega-constellations, known ... Read More

4170 Trading is a financial trading firm. For my internship, I worked on several projects that helped their efficiency and reliability. For the first semester, I worked on a data pipeline improvement, in which I created an automated program for automatically updating and downloading a set of products to trade. After that, I created an announcement system using the Discord ... Read More

This project aims to understand and address the unequal distribution of resources within the Chicago Public School System. We have conducted various analyses using data science techniques such as Microsoft Excel functions, SQL, and Tableau. Our data sources are publicly available datasets under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) from CPS and the Illinois State Board of Education, including transfer ... Read More

Around the world, diabetes has become a disease that is increasing in the population. Although not fatal, it can impact a person’s life especially in their diet. One of the things that diabetics will face is the foregoing of sugary foods. As a substitute, many food companies decided to create artificial sweeteners such as Splenda and Equal. However, it is ... Read More

We present a study of the expected efficiencies of different three- and four-lepton decay channels of the H++ particle at the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The H++ particle is a Higgs-like scalar particle that arises in certain extensions of the Standard Model. We investigate the decay of the H++ particle in the context of the left-right ... Read More

Topological data analysis (TDA) combines algebraic topology and other tools from pure mathematics to allow for a rigorous study of the 'shape' inherent to data. The foundational tool is persistent homology, an extension of homology to point cloud data. Persistent homology has been applied to various types of data in computer vision, manufacturing of porous materials, and cell differentiation trajectories.

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. Three experimental groups were looked at, ... Read More

At present, dark matter theories predict the presence of dark photons. Detection of dark photons could provide insights into the nature of dark matter and its interactions with ordinary matter. Monte Carlo simulations are generated to understand Dark Photon production. Thus, we report the results of various files created. Monte Carlo generation was automated to derive branching ratios for dark ... Read More

Over the past year, this study delved into the libraries of Cirq and in understanding many different concepts within Quantum Computing. We explored quantum circuits using the open-source frameworks of Cirq for projects. Different techniques and mechanisms were studied including depolarizing noise models, amplitude damping, and dephasing. Effects of noise were looked at on many different algorithms and implement with ... Read More

The Pollack Lab is primarily focused on immunology work with sarcomas, and we recognize the benefits of GFP positive cell lines to image metastases, quantify angiogenesis, and analyze various other hallmarks of cancer and tumor characteristics. Our lab is planning to host a variety of killing assays and in vitro experiments for a new mouse study in which a GFP ... Read More

Network Perception is a cybersecurity company that organizes and tests the strength of firewall systems. They work with a variety of different operating systems for different clients, and the purpose of this business project was to begin working on the software for a new operating system, Juniper or JunOS. Over the last six months, I wrote python regular expression tests ... Read More

Fungal mycetoma is a neglected tropical disease that destroys skin, subcutaneous, and bone tissues in limbs, causing deformity, physical disability, and in severe cases death. 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. Although progress is being ... Read More

The impacts of general exercise and sports on mental health is emerging as a significant research front, with more than 34 studies from over 10 countries concluding positive behavioral health outcomes as a result of team sports and about 74% of sports-related studies demonstrating an improvement in psychological health in participants who engaged in athletic activities (Zuckerman et al., 2020). ... Read More

Oral food challenges (OFC) are the gold-standard method to confirm the diagnosis of food allergies but entail a risk of inducing allergic reactions. To more accurately identify which patients are likely to successfully complete an OFC, researchers have calculated optimal allergen-specific/total IgE ratios for various food types. If this sIgE/tIgE ratio is less than the cutoff value, the patient is ... Read More

Studies have been conducted to determine the role of overlapping resonance’s chaos and stability within two to three planetary systems. Most studies prove that overlapping resonances are the cause of chaotic orbits and thus the stability of systems, however, it is not understood how resonances contribute to the stability of multi-planet systems. Our project investigates the roles of overlapping first-order ... Read More

A dark photon (ZD) is a theoretical boson in a new Abelian U(1) gauge symmetry which is predicted by various dark sector models. Dark photons originating from different models can all decay to collimated lepton jets via a process known as kinetic mixing. Production mechanisms for dark photons can vary widely but generally make use of a dark pseudoscalar. I ... Read More

Osteogenesis Imperfecta (OI) is a rare collagen disease that affects patients with impaired bone growth, a greater risk of fractures, and other bodily impairments such as hearing loss. This paper observes differences in concentrations of biologically essential elements in the middle ear of oim mice, alendronate-treated oim mice, WT mice, and alendronate-treated WT mice using X-ray fluorescence microscopy (XFM). XFM ... Read More

Natural products have been used throughout history to treat various illnesses and diseases. Approximately 80% of drugs on the market are derived from natural products, which include plants, herbs, and other organisms. Psidium guajava, known as guava, is a popular fruit found in the Philippines, a tropical country in Southeast Asia. Not only is Psidium guajava a staple in many ... Read More

Machine learning and artificial intelligence have become increasingly used in the healthcare industry, but they have privacy concerns. Federated learning is presented as a potential solution to these concerns, but its vulnerability to inference attacks is noted. The Argonne Privacy-Preserving Federated Learning (APPFL) framework is introduced as a privacy-preserving technique for federated learning. The project aims to evaluate the effectiveness ... Read More

The Cement industry is responsible for at least 8% of the world's CO2 emissions. When limestone is fired in a kiln, CO2 is released into the atmosphere through a chemical reaction; this is in addition to all the pollution that is created when transporting cement building materials from site to site, and any other processes of the cement industry. Previous ... Read More

PM Construction is a general contracting company that performs a wide range of construction contracts, but specializes in commercial construction. The focus of the business project was construction design with Computer Aided Design (CAD) software, though the types of projects changed due to the departure of Erim Tezcan from the company. Over the course of seven months, the company provided ... Read More

For public sector jobs such as university professors, there are two types of available retirement plans for their retirement package: The Defined Contribution (DC) and Defined Benefit (DB) plan. We will discuss the key differences between these plans, including their structure, benefits, and risks. One critical factor to compare these two plans is the Net Present Value (NPV). NPV is ... Read More

Legged locomotion on soft-ground is essential to designing robots for tasks such as disaster relief and extraterrestrial exploration where the ground is typically 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

The pursuit of aviation by minorities has gained significant attention as the aviation industry strives to foster diversity and inclusiveness. Historically, minorities have had lower representation in aviation, prompting current efforts from leading companies like NASA and United Airlines to rectify the situation. Therefore, my current project involves undertaking ground school courses and working towards obtaining my Private Pilot license ... Read More

APS Data Technologies is a software development company focused on developing tools for businesses within the Aurora community to improve the profitability and efficiency of day-to-day tasks. The focus of the business project for APS Data Technologies changed over time and included market research, mobile application development, artificial intelligence model development, backend development, and web development. Over the course of ... Read More

The Hoffmeister Series ranks ions found in salts based on their effects on protein solubility. The series ranks them from “salting in” to “salting out”, i.e. how strongly the ions cause proteins to either dissolve or precipitate. It has been believed previously that ions of the same valence will cause a similar effect, however, in fact each ion has a ... Read More

Mentoring Youth Through Technology (MYTT) is a technology company that provides STEM education opportunities to underserved students in the Chicagoland area. The focus of the business project is to create a mentorship program for middle school aged girls that teach important social-emotional skills, build confidence and community, and provide career exposure that runs through MYTT. Over the last several months, ... Read More

Community detection is the problem of identifying groups or clusters of nodes in a network that are more densely connected to each other than to the other clusters. This is an important problem in network analysis and has applications in a wide range of fields, including social networks, biology, and computer science. In 1983, the Stochastic Block Model (SBM) was ... Read More

Cognitive resilience, the ability to recover from productivity-impairing stressors, has recently been shown to increase determination, decrease stress, and increase academic and occupational performance with higher cognitive resilience. Similarly, meeting strength training and cardiorespiratory exercise guidelines have been shown to accompany increased cognitive function and better grade point averages (GPAs) in college students. However, the correlation between meeting physical activity ... Read More

The equity price of a business determines its success, at least in the eyes of an investor. The higher the stock price, the more support the business receives from its investors; conversely, the lower the stock price, the less support the company gets from its investors. Guided by Dr. Carola Frydman at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, this paper ... Read More

Diabetes mellitus is a predominantly chronic disease that results from blood glucose levels that exceed healthy limits. Diabetes is on the rise in modern times, and an estimated 366.000,000 people are expected to have this disease by 2030. The primary way to treat diabetes and prevent complications is to have proper dietary habits and eat nutritious foods. Some condiments are ... Read More

In order to discover results faster, we have worked on simulating specific events through CRAB. CRAB submission to the grid allows multiple online computers to run several jobs simultaneously thus allowing for shorter turnback time. We utilize the outputs by finding limits on our data which assist with the analysis of particle events thus helping with our limit cuts on ... Read More

Alzheimer’s disease is a progressive, and often fatal, disease, and is the leading cause of dementia in older people (Chang et. al, 2003). Based on the amyloid-ß oligomer hypothesis, the brain damage that leads to Alzheimer’s is due to soluble, ligand-like amyloid-ß oligomers (AßOs) (Lambert et. al, 1998, Gong et. al, 2003, Cline et. al, 2018). The aim of this ... Read More

Taking Control is a mental health therapy and psychiatry company which helps people access the mental health resources they need, including licensed therapists and nurse practitioners. The focus of the business project for Taking Control changed over time and included website management, digital project assistance, and providing creative input and media. Over the course of six months, the company provided ... Read More

The purpose of this research is to develop an algorithm for the Duckiebot to detect obstacles in the Duckietown field. Autonomous vehicles rely on internal and external sensors to understand the surrounding environment. On the road, self-driving vehicles depend on image processing to identify cars and pedestrians. Through this research, the purpose is to prevent collisions between the Duckiebot and ... Read More

Abilify, drug name Aripiprazole, is known to treat a multitude of mental disorders and behavioral impairments such as Bipolar I Disorder, schizophrenia, and irritability associated with autism. Using SeeSAR, a computer-aided drug design program, and the crystal structure of 5-HT2AR in complex with aripiprazole, novel molecules were designed to find stronger binding affinities to the enzyme. More than one hundred ... Read More

Yttrium oxide (Y₂O₃) has potential in cancer theranostics when combined with radiation to generate reactive oxygen species (ROS) that damage cells. Our goal is to create silica-coated Y₂O₃ nanoparticles (Y₂O₃:Eu@SiO₂) to improve tumor treatment through radiation. Y₂O₃:Eu nanoparticles (NP) were first synthesized and coated with silica shells. Their core sizes, shell thicknesses, and morphology were measured. Next, the antibody against ... Read More

Researchers use a technique called gene targeting, which involves introducing a new gene into the mouse genome and replacing a portion of the endogenous gene with the new gene. In the case of PCP2-MK mice, a modified version of the PCP2 gene is introduced to Purkinje cells in the cerebellum: allowing researchers to study the functions of the cerebellum and ... Read More

The organization of the City of Aurora strives to provide resources for community citizens. Our business project focused on reaching overall outcomes in a quick and efficient manner, with excellent results. This allowed us to gain skills in communication, knowledge of government and problem-solving through the course of multiple projects from assisting the company’s grant writer to collecting data for ... Read More

The Chicago “L” rail transit network connects the city’s North, South, and West Sides, which have experienced different economic outcomes due to the historical circumstances affecting population and wealth distribution. Previous research on public transit systems worldwide mainly focused on the effect of urban policy and public transit accessibility on public transit demand. This paper examined the accessibility of each ... Read More

The doubly charged Higgs boson is a beyond the standard model particle that arises in the Left-Right Symmetric Model. The invariant mass of this particle is a quantity related to the mass that is the same in every reference frame and is conserved, which makes it useful to measure. The same sign invariant mass histograms of a doubly charged Higgs ... Read More

Portfolio optimization is the process of gathering the stocks most likely to create a well-rounded portfolio with the most opportunity to generate greater returns for its shareholders. Programming languages such as python can be used to calculate the volatility of certain stocks in order to reach an optimal portfolio. Certain packages and data readers found in Python are utilized for ... Read More

Using the identification of jets originating from b quarks, we eliminate a source of background in our search for the dark photon. These “b-tagged” jets often contain lepton pairs that are similar to the decay of dark photons. A veto against these jets further isolates the dark photon signal, aiding in analysis. The extent to which efficiency changes due to ... Read More

Mentoring Youth Through Technology (MYTT) is a nonprofit focused on providing STEM opportunities and mentorship to youth in under-served communities. Over time, the project's focus became more specific and evolved from general software development into making a photo booth with the Raspberry Pi microprocessor. In the beginning of the project, the organization had the intern work on projects involving the ... Read More

Natural Language Processing is an effective tool for analyzing large volumes of text effectively. However, most scientific articles contain sophisticated language that can be difficult to understand effectively and quickly. To expedite this, I tuned a model that can quickly classify abstract datasets about scientific topics into specific subcategories. Using the ArXiv corpus with over 2.2 million abstracts, I created ... Read More

The variational quantum eigensolver has been shown to be an efficient and accurate algorithm which can be implemented on NISQ era quantum computers. The variational quantum eigensolver relies on both classical and quantum computing, finding appropriate classical algorithms to combine with quantum computation will greatly improve the applicability of this algorithm.

Last year, Gokul Ravi and others demonstrated a novel ... Read More

Wastewater-Based Epidemiology (WBE) has been utilized in various countries to control and address the spread of infectious diseases, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. This field aids public health officials in making real-time decisions as viral particles are present in the body residues of infected individuals, even those who are asymptomatic. WBE is a non-invasive and cost-effective technique that can be ... Read More

The company SafeStart is focused on solving the issues surrounding surgical safety through the use of an app that promotes patient engagement along with the reduction of delays and cancellations. SafeStart’s goal is to prevent “never events” from occurring, which are incidents where a serious error is caused by improper safety procedures. Over the course of this business project, interns ... Read More