This project will survey physicians to find the prevalence of sustainable treatments like nutrition are in reducing prevalence of ADHD symptoms and how to increase awareness of treatment options to patients diagnosed with ADHD.

The ocean is full of unharnessed, clean energy. For the past two years, I've been engineering a device that generates electricity from the power of waves. My goal is to make an efficient, small-scale, and easy-to-use prototype for people without access to electricity. I've built many prototypes and tested them in the ocean - this year I'm focusing on improving durability so I can test for longer periods of time and solidify my proof-of-concept.

This research project focuses on the effectiveness of the Autism Superpower Glasses on blind individuals. A team at Stanford University developed the Autism Superpower Glass, which is a wearable technology that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to help children with autism recognize facial emotions. The goal of this project is to determine how successful the glasses are on a different population with different needs. Potentially, the research and data collected could make the Autism Superpower Glasses accessible to the blind population.

This research project will focus on constructing a self-driving model car using a Raspberry Pi along with infrared and ultrasound sensors. The infrared sensors are used to specifically detect heat sources, which simulate living creatures in the path of the car, while the ultrasound sensors are used to determine the actual distance between the object and the car. In the end, the car is expected to be able to travel from a designated point on a four by four meter grid with obstacles to the end. This project is split into two sections, the research, which was done this year, and the build process, which will be done next year.

Melanoma affects over 100,000 Americans every year. We can combine more granular insights from single cell biology with clinical information from bulk RNA sequencing data. Using drug-labelled single cell data alongside melanoma clinical data from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) we extract promising general and drug response specific gene markers and examine their relationship with patient survival. We found gene signatures related to cell type, treated with drugs, and survival that will help design treatments to kill cancer cells rather than normal cells. We also generated a pipeline to do this analysis.

Capacitive keyboards are known to be extremely tolerant of harsh working environments, yet are notoriously difficult to type on. This project explores the feasibility of a contoured capacitive keyboard surface that enhances a user's ability to locate their fingers on the keyboard, thus improving the overall typing experience. A series of CAD models are created and used to construct a set of individual keyboard keys. These keys are then tested to identify features that lead to increased or decreased key sensitivity, producing a framework for a full scale contoured capacitive keyboard.

Research has shown that humans have individual locational visual perception differences, such that individual subjects will make repeated similar errors when attempting to locate points in the same relative position in their visual field. Individual differences in object localization allow us to generate a localization map specific to users, which has been done in the past. This project takes this further and uses this map to generate a warped gabor patch, which is then flashed to the subject to measure whether priming could be used to improve object localization for participants. If visual-spatial acuity can be improved through the use of priming, this could be applied to improve judgments on localizing objects in real-time. This could lead to future research in whether this would have permanent benefits through visual training, be integrated through the real-time calculation to improve visual perception, and be an introduction into a plethora of possible tools for visual perception manipulation and improvement.

Histoplasmosis is the largest endemic fungal infection in North America caused by H. Capsulatum. It affects 250,000 people every year in the U.S.A with a mortality rate of 5% to 8%. Currently there are no drugs that are specially manufactured to treat Histoplasmosis. Determining the factors that influence protein production in the yeast form of H. Capsulatum is the key to finding methods to regulate the gene inside the fungi and invent powerful drugs to treat Histoplasmosis. However, what sequence elements in 5’ UTR​ ​determine TE in Histoplasma is not well understood. I explored the 5’ UTR region of 4981 genes common to 4 strains of Histoplasma to identify a correlation between the different sequence elements in the 5’ UTR of mRNA and TE. Subsequently, using these sequence elements I developed computational models to predict TE. The results demonstrate that the CG/ATG ratio has the best correlation to TE. Also, computational models using Random Forest outperformed other machine learning algorithms to best predict TE. My research was the first to investigate 5’ UTR of mRNA and discover that CG to ATG ratio significantly affects TE in H. Capsulatum. This research was also the first to develop 4 computational models to predict TE of Histoplasma. These discoveries are a key step towards future research on developing powerful drugs for the treatment of Histoplasmosis.

This research project is about indoor pollution and cooking. Today, about 4.6 million people die each year due to air pollution. Air pollution can be linked to many different types of diseases. One of the most serious diseases is lung cancer. This project will address indoor pollution that is caused by cooking and may be linked to lung cancer. An experiment will be conducted to test the amount of pm2.5 and TVOC been produced during different methods of cooking.

In the United States, over 14 million people are getting infected with HPV every year. HPV, Human Papillomavirus, is a common sexually transmitted disease among women and men. This research project will go in-depth about the safety and severe side effects of the vaccine, although it only happens very rarely, and the frequency in which it occurs. This research will also cover different medical treatments to treat HPV.