The Los Angeles Police Department has a long history of racism, leading to racially motivated police misconduct. This racially motivated police misconduct is still happening today, but there are also police officers whose actions are justified. The goal of this project is to identify a way to discern racially motivated police misconduct within the Los Angeles Police Department from justified actions. This project will result in a proposal being sent to the LAPD, with at least a partial solution backed with evidence drawn from databases, documents, and text.

Death is inevitable, and along with it, so is grief. The process of grieving encompasses a large range of emotions. The experience is different for everybody and continues to change as we age. Multiple studies have found that the grieving process is significantly different in adults than in children, for a variety of reasons. However, many of the authors did not study the adults' experiences in depth, sparking my curiosity. Through extensive research and interviews, I explored the grieving process in both children who have lost parents and parents who have lost children, specifically how they differ.

In PAUSD, 85% of white students are meeting the standards for English and Math, while only 45% of African Americans are meeting the English standards and 35% are meeting the standard for Math (Kolar, 2017); one of many examples of the achievement gap in the district. Social dynamics between races are one cause of this achievement gap; these race-based social stressors, such as stereotype threat and fear of discrimination, release cortisol, a steroid hormone that increases when the body is stressed and causes loss in motivation, concentration, weaker memory, and weaken performance (Adams, 2016). Analyzing state-mandated test scores for all PAUSD students from Kindergarten through 12th grade will help illuminate when social dynamics start to have an effect on the achievement gap, and interviewing the PAUSD equity coordinator and Paly Black Student Union advisor will help illustrate the culture in PAUSD and how discrimination affects minority students.

Anti-LGBT hate crimes have become increasingly common in the past few years. Some research has been done on the demographics of people who are most impacted and on reporting discrepancies that underrepresent the frequency of hate crimes; however, very little research has been done to explore the leading causes for the increase, including whether anti-LGBT legislation plays a role in hate crimes. This project will explore how bias against a population is related to receiving single-sided information that is intended to invoke fear of that population. The intent is to determine whether or not anti-LGBT legislation, which is generally rooted in fear, is a cause of hate crimes.

This research is focusing on the dispute between the Palo Alto Unified School District and the Palo Alto community over the installation of solar panels. The panels were installed without advising the people first, which led to a conflict. Now, there is a heated debate over whether or not installing the solar panels was a good move, and my research seeks to provide evaluation of the aftermath.

Margaret Tinsley and other parents of the Ravenswood School District filed a petition to combat the disparity in the quality of education between their school district and surrounding districts. A program was created in 1986 as part of the Settlement Order in San Mateo County Court. 30 years later, researchers and some local residents believe this program to be largely ineffective. My research will serve as a needs assessment for the program in the form of an action research study. After identifying significant issues, I will formulate solutions and present them to the administrators of the program.

Today, almost 3 billion people live in a society whose economy is hindered by wide-ranging factors and encourages widespread poverty, low education levels, and corruption. Though there is a wealth of analytical literature on the topic of developing economics, studying a specific region that contains a diverse subset of economic situations allows one to compare and contrast factors and methods that contribute and alleviate economic depression. This project will look for similarities in factors between several countries in Southeast Asia and compare the methods used to improve the economy.

There is a problem with a lack of political representation for the bottom 80% of the U.S. population, despite the fact that the United States considers itself a democratic society. Since Presidents continue to be elected through the Electoral College and not the popular vote, society is negatively affected because “middle America” does not believe that their needs and voices are heard. A possible cause of this problem is that the ultra-rich can purchase political favors and that the U.S. “Social Experiment” in democracy may not actually be successful. Democracy began as a social experiment in the United States, yet can America be considered a true democracy when money is the greatest influencer of political outcomes?