I began to appreciate such simplicity, and to redefine my understanding of mathematics. I came to see it as being much more than just its constituent symbols and equations, but a beautiful language capable of describing the logical foundations of all the natural sciences. Over time, that same beauty began to appear everywhere I looked … Aortic stenosis (AS) is a lethal disease that can lead to severe cardiac complications if left untreated.

When I was little, I always wondered why my parents worked late every day. While my friends went home after preschool, I would stay at my parents labs, waiting for them to finish their research. What was so interesting about science? One day, I begged my dad to show me his experiments. Smiling at my enthusiasm, he scraped some of my cheek cells and put them under the microscope. As he pointed out the nucleus and organelles of each cell, I watched in awe at the hidden complexity within my own body.

Ever since Galactic Cosmic Rays were detected by Victor Hess 100 years ago (Hess 1912), their origin has been a mystery; what stellar object is powerful enough to accelerate particles into TeV energy ranges, and how does it release so much of them? Galactic Cosmic Rays are capable of releasing high energy X-rays and gamma rays, with energies up to GeV, as they travel through the interstellar medium. By studying the spectral patterns of the emitted X-rays and gamma rays, we can gain insight into the nature of the Cosmic rays themselves.

It wasn’t until my sophomore year in high school, however, that I became interested in astronomy. I had heard from other students at my school about the Science Internship Program, which gives research opportunities to high school students and is run by UC Santa Cruz Astronomy and Astrophysics Professor Raja GuhaThakurta. I discussed possible projects with Raja, who became my mentor, and ultimately decided on my project, a search for very distant galaxies, because I thought it would be exciting to look back in time.

I am fascinated by problems that require a blend of computational topology, geometry, and number theory. I have also been studying fractals which interesting geometrical objects that have been used in diverse applications such as cryptography, seismology, network optimization, and even weather forecasting. However, despite the wide range of applications and interest in fractals, the general theory of these objects is still in its infancy. My work on this research project has developed some theorems and conjectures in the field of combinatorics and has begun to shed some light on some areas of fractals, one-cell automata and dynamical systems … This need for optimization has become increasingly more important in today’s society from the perspective of both resource management as well as leveraging new opportunities.

My inspiration came at breakfast one day, when CNN switched to a story about the Icelandic volcanic eruption that had grounded air traffic across Europe (due to the abrasive, potentially explosion-causing action that debris has in engines). My immediate thought was, “Someone should fix that.” … I always am asked whether foreign object damage, FOD, is really that major a problem, because most people have seen a few news reports on jets crash-landing after bird strikes or other major accidents, but they don’t know that thousands of these incidents, albeit more minor, happen yearly.

Evolutionary Biology is an extremely diverse field, in which studies of evolution occur both on the anatomical and molecular level. The anatomical level of this incredible field includes research like mine, used to reveal more about Earth’s past and creation, and to detail organism relationships using phylogenetic trees. This type of work reveals so much about the past that it is astounding … Archosaurs are an incredibly diverse and evolutionary highly successful group of organisms that include birds, crocodilians, and the now-extinct dinosaurs and pterosaurs (Brusatte, 2010).

The first respect in which this paper breaks from much of the literature is that it rejects the notion that bullying behavior is carried out by a small, identifiable social group. Rather, bullying is regarded herein as a widespread social phenomenon, characteristic of the social interactions of those who would not be branded as bullies in the traditional sense. Bullying behavior is not emblematic of the mentally or emotionally disturbed bully, but rather is an inevitable result of the repeated convergence of motivating and enabling factors of bullying behavior (Zapf, 1999).

Next-generation sequencing (NGS) has allowed substantial advances in cancer genomics. In fact, large-scale discovery efforts have propelled the identification of hundreds of cancer-related genes in recent years. To be truly transforming, however, key cancer-associated mutations must be profiled systematically in the clinical and translational arena to guide rational cancer therapeutics. This aim has yet to be achieved on a larges-cale, mainly because many methodologies cannot be applied efficiently and reliably on formalin-fixed paraffin embedded (FFPE) tumor samples that are routinely encountered in the clinic and in archived tumor banks.

My research work involved analyzing sediments from three coastal lakes in Japan to reconstruct history of past inundations. The sediments were collected from the lake bottom in the form of vertical cylindrical cores from the approximately the center of the lakes. Sediments collected from anywhere else would not be a stable archive of past inundations as they may get washed or shift with further inundations. Then the sediments were analyzed for grain size and content of organic and in organic materials on a layer by layer basis.

My work on this project has made me see the connection between science and the social policy and historical issues that are so important to me. I did not understand before how valuable and critical social science analytical tools could be in understanding what I consider to be key moral issues of our time, such as what I studied here – how to reduce health and poverty in this country and abroad.

In high school, I endeavored to participate in the Brain Bee competitions, the equivalent of the Scripps National Spelling Bee or National Geography Bee, except on neuroscience trivia. Here, I became exposed to the fascinating aspects of the nervous system, especially its striking adaptive capabilities called plasticity. Having read about extraordinary cases in which patients afflicted with neurological disorders managed to survive with minimum personality change or psychological impact, I wondered how far the brain’s resiliency can extend, and more importantly, if it could be harnessed to treat neurological disorders in the future.

For a moment, just think about it. Think about waking up in the middle of the night, thirsty, and not being able to access water because it is rationed so that the rest of your community can share the resource. Imagine using the restroom and having no water in the toilet because water is only cleaning out the latrine once a day. Although such scenarios seem quite extreme and impossible to many living in first world countries, this can become a reality at the rate at which water is being consumed and the inefficient manner it is being distributed … The water source on Earth is rapidly diminishing, and this is not new knowledge nor of new concern.

Oftentimes, there are “bad guys” such as diseases, wildfires, or thieves that the “good guys” such as the CDC, firemen, or police wish to control or capture. However, the good guys only have a limited quantity of assets such as money, people, and time, so it is important for them to use the least amount of resources. One well-known way of analyzing such problems is known as “Cops and Robbers on a Graph”.

I’ve lived in the small town of Burnt Hills, New York for all of my life. Starting at a young age I developed a love for science. In my spare time I would polish rocks in my rock tumbler. I spent hours digging around my gravel driveway trying to pick out the quartz among the limestone. I also enjoyed analyzing fingerprints with my toy forensic kit. At one point I actually wanted to become a forensic anthropologist (the show Bones was a favorite of mine).

Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is an auto-immune disease that attacks the central nervous system. Almost 10,000 people are diagnosed every year, and depending on age, at least 40% of people with MS are unemployed, suggesting the severity of its debilitation within society. Specifically, it occurs when the immune system attacks the myelin sheath, a protective coating around the axons of nerve cells of the brain. The myelin sheath is composed of white matter, functioning to help nerve cells send signals quickly and smoothly throughout the brain.

The title of my paper was “The Sky’s the Limit- An Investigation of Cloud Cover on Major League Baseball Performance.” My research project was inspired by a genuine passion for the game of baseball and my desire to learn more about its subtle nuances. I often wondered how much weather variables such as sun, clouds and shadows affected the outcome of a game or individual player performance. My curiosity prompted me to do some preliminary research to identify whether these questions were previously investigated.

To predict the response of estuarine ecosystems to anthropogenic and natural changes, process-based physical computer models serve as an important tool for simulation of estuarine salinity. Among the school of data-driven parametric models as alternative tools for process-based physical models to simulate environmental variables, artificial neural networks (ANNs) have become an increasingly popular modeling technique over the past two decades (Maren et al., 1990; Schalkoff, 1997; Dawson and Wilby, 2001; Maier and Dandy, 2001; Dawson et al.

Imagine being plunged perpetually into a silence where the ubiquity of sound is irrelevant. That is the world which many students in my high school experience. My inspiration for this project really came from the students in my high school’s Deaf and Hard of Hearing (DHH) program. My school has a department which offers a high school education to DHH students across Orange County. The students in this program take many of the same classes as the other students, using an interpreter to understand the lectures.