It all started when I thought I had gingivitis. I came to this conclusion after consulting the most reputable source I knew, webmd.com of course. Sitting at the doctor’s office, I anxiously waited for the confirmation. Were my suspicions correct? Nope! As my doctor explained my negative result, guilt slowly overcame me. I had just wasted three hours of my dad’s time. Driving home, I was determined to find meaning in this seemingly unfulfilling trip, and indeed I did.

Since 2014 I have watched forests and farms struggle against the spotted lanternfly. As I saw my community struggle I decided to take action. I organized “scraping parties,” where I taught others the dangers of the spotted lanternfly and how to scrape their egg masses. Additionally, I created a YouTube video and many flyers that teach about the importance of eradicating the spotted lanternfly. I even planted over 600 grapevines at a local vineyard, to make up for the ones lost due to the spotted lanternfly… I changed the focus of my project to determine the feeding pattern of the spotted lanternfly, using phloem sap from the spotted lanternflies’ host plants.

Gastrointestinal illnesses afflict more than 100 million people in the U.S. alone and are often indicated by gut microbiota motility. Typically, swarming bacteria are indicators of infection while swimming bacteria are more innocuous. Current diagnostic methods for intestinal diseases are lengthy, expensive, non-specific, or lead to serious complications. This study proposes a novel way to diagnose Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) through quantitatively distinguishing bacterial motion. Current methods of discerning bacterial motility involve only qualitative description without consideration of potential medical applications; no quantitative models to differentiate bacterial motility exist.

During the winter of 2020, I was expecting to have a very different project for the summer. COVID was not something that was on everyone’s minds all the time, and I was spending time looking and applying for internships in a lab performing biological research. Biology has always been of great interest to me, and I want to pursue biomedical engineering in the future. When the pandemic hit, my summer plans were upended.

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related deaths in the world and succeeding melanoma skin cancer, it is the second leading cancer in men and women. Accessibility to the expensive imaging technology and accurate diagnostic tools for this disease is limited and therefore leads to death at an early stage. The need exists to develop an innovative diagnostic and detection measure to promptly detect the presence and type of cancer.

Heart disease or cardiovascular disease - are two words that a patient prays not to hear during diagnosis. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of death for men and women across most racial and ethnic groups in the U.S. CVD is the grim reaper of diseases, accounting for approximately 655,000 deaths annually, or 25% of all deaths in America (pre-COVID-19 pandemic).

A few years ago, my best friend returned from her vacation to the island of Cozumel off the coast of Mexico with a GoPro full of images she had taken while paragliding, hiking, and relaxing on the beach. Most interesting to me, however, were the photos she had taken while scuba diving in the coral reefs that surround the island. As we scrolled through dozens of pictures of corals, I realized that my friend, like millions of other tourists, had in her possession a treasure trove of information about the health of the coral reefs of Cozumel at the time she visited.

Sensitive crop regions are constantly under environmental stresses that foster plentiful plant disease. Basil plants, for instance, have been victims of Fusarium oxysporum (F.o.) wilt for decades, where growth conditions have stimulated progression of this disease, and subsequent crop destruction. A simple and effective treatment that would eradicate F.o wilt, while promoting overall plant growth, is needed. Metallic nanoparticles (NPs) have shown to improve plant health and overall crop yield, due to systemic movement through the plant’s root system, where the nutritional value of metallic nanoparticles is fully realized.

As I gathered data to analyze, I ran into the striking problem of racial bias in all available samples and the disparity in early diagnosis and survival rates between the African American population and European individuals. As a woman of color and youth activist myself, I wanted to start a project that studied cancer epigenetics in the context of population-specific health disparities to begin revolutionizing early and equitable diagnosis methods and treatment options.

I’ve always had a keen interest in the field of veterinary medicine. Towards the beginning of my high school career, I discovered animal physical rehabilitation. I had realized there was this field completely devoted to the healing process for various animals’ injuries and even used as a surgical alternative. As I explored this topic further, I wanted to do something about it, so I decided to sign up for the Science Research program during my Freshman year.

Did you know that we’ve been studying the expanses of outer space longer than our own brains?! The term neuroscience was coined barely a century ago, proving how little we know about the 3 pound supercomputer within each and every one of us … as I started reading background literature, I became hooked! I found it incredible the way the brain stores the people, places, and items we see everyday like shelved books in a library.

My research was motivated by my profound interest in how adolescents use social media, and TikTok in particular, which stemmed from my own personal experience with the platform and my previous scientific research in this area. I had already begun to conduct research on TikTok during my junior year, so I knew that there was very little scientific literature about this youth-dominated platform. My junior year research project was focused on the socioemotional well-being of adolescent TikTok users, and was conducted to satisfy my personal concern about how my usage might be impacting my own moods.

The main problem of our project was investigating whether or not there was an efficient 2D analog to the segment tree. Here, instead of updating and querying arbitrary ranges of a list of numbers, we want to update and query arbitrary submatrices of a matrix of numbers. When updating a submatrix, we add all numbers in the submatrix with an arbitrarily chosen constant value; when querying a submatrix, we find the minimum of all numbers in the submatrix.