Currently, two-thirds of the global population experiences water scarcity. One-fifth of the world population currently lives in conditions of physical water scarcity, where there is not enough water to meet their demands, and one-quarter of the world’s population experiences economic water scarcity, where their region has enough water to meet the necessary personal, agricultural, environmental, and industrial needs, but lack sustainable accessibility. Existing literature determined that water scarcity occurred more often in areas where irrigation systems had low water productivity (WP) and water use efficiency (WUE), primarily caused by a lack of sufficient irrigation scheduling technology.

I have always enjoyed science, ever since I was 7 and read that over 6 billion bacteria live in your mouth. For a 7 year old, this was a scary thought. I refused to eat during meals. I never closed my mouth, as to let the invaders out. I stopped breathing through my mouth and relied only on my nose. However, I am proud to say that I am no longer afraid of being a home to my microscopic friends.

I was always a nature person and felt connected with the outdoors. There was something therapeutic about being alone by the water- just a wandering mind and the constant breaking of the waves along the shoreline. To me, the raw beauty of the environment is worth preserving because the small moments where we get the chance to truly appreciate nature are the most memorable ones. In a time where economic gains are prioritized above the state of the environment, it is disheartening to see that the environment that took billions of years to form is being dismantled in a span of decades … As I learned more about the major issues surrounding oceanic life and climate change, I became drawn to corals, who played pivotal roles in the balance of marine ecosystems while maintaining their intrinsic beauty.

Like so many others, COVID-19 has had a major impact on my life. My home state, New York was caught unprepared for the pandemic, at great loss. The ensuing response from government and private entities was scattered at best, and at times dangerous. The immense impact COVID has had on my family, community and country inspired me to research it. As the shock of a pandemic began to wear off, and states began reopening, conjectures about the differences between parties and states were widely articulated in the media and public discourse, with little data to support it.

My grandmother was my best friend. She laughed when I laughed; she cried when I cried. I wondered why she was suddenly forgetting things she had no problem remembering before. How could my grandma suddenly forget what country she was in? How could my grandma not even remember my name? … Alzheimer’s Disease is one of the most common neurodegenerative diseases. An emerging field of science is genomic neurology, which explores the genetic basis for neurodegenerative diseases.

Since I was young, I have always been interested in hurricanes. I became increasingly interested after witnessing hurricanes taking place, specifically Hurricane Irene and Hurricane Sandy in New York, when I was in elementary school. Instead of being scared of these natural disasters, I wanted to learn more about them. I followed the news of every major hurricane that impacted the United States, eager to know the most that I could about each hurricane.

Human brains are way too complicated with billions of neurons and hundreds and even thousands of trillion connections that are still not completely understood. Because of this, studying a smaller “brain” permits one to better understand how the brain and the neural network influences the behavior of a creature. The C. elegans’ connectome is the ideal network to research because of its simplicity (only consisting of 302 neurons and the fact that it has been completely mapped out.

One evening in the summer of 2020, well after the severity and endurance of the COVID-19 pandemic had become evident, I was having a chat with my father at the dinner table. Both STEM people, our talks often leaned towards the topic of science, especially in the realm of current events. This time, it was the matter of COVID testing that made its appearance. Testing, so essential to managing an outbreak, yet so scarce when it was needed.

My research journey started from when I was a volunteer at a memory and rehabilitation center at my local city. There, I saw the drastic effects of neurodegenerative diseases on individuals making it incredibly hard to continue daily life. Motivated by my interest in neuroscience, I decided to start a research project in computational neuroscience … Neurological disorders continue to affect millions of people worldwide, with diseases leading to loss of cognitive function, a decline in memory, and even death.

Starting from a young age, I had seen people in my life suffer as a result of domestic violence as well as seen and experienced firsthand the stress associated with financial instability. In 2020, the first case COVID-19 was reported in America, thus sparking the news to be flooded with stories of the toll this pandemic was taking on our well-being and the economy. Due to my understanding of the connection between relationship and economic instability from personal experiences, I became concerned about how the economic crisis brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic could affect marital relationships … For many individuals, being in debt and living paycheck to paycheck or based on future paychecks is their reality (Cecchetti et al.

Last summer, Washington experienced a record-breaking heatwave. The three-day stretch of scorching heat not only had a catastrophic effect on the state’s residents, but also its crops, thus impacting the food supply. I recorded 116 degrees at my house on June 28th, 2021. I saw news reports of entire fields of potatoes and cherries being destroyed, and fruits that stopped growing from the unusually high temperatures. With so much devastation to farmers, I began wondering how farmers are going to cope with the inevitability of future heat waves.

Pain is tricky to study. Along with being the most prevalent chronic medical condition in the world, pain forces us to combine our understanding of physiology and the philosophy of the self and mind. This is because pain is considered a “subjective experience”, limited to the individual themselves … We can think of many examples where two different people are presented with the same stimuli or situation and produce a different response: stubbing a toe or holding a hot object, for example.

Cognitive distortions are individually generating thoughts or feelings that are negative, persuasive, and usually inaccurately based on reality. Cognitive distortions can also be referred to as types of thinking. Cognitive distortions all share the commonality of representing an individual’s private negative thinking about themselves and could cause an individual to interact negatively with others. For example, one cognitive distortion type is mental filtering. Mental filtering is when an individual focuses on the negative instead of the positive in a specific current situation.

In fifth grade, I joined a FIRST Lego League robotics team, and although my team of all first-years placed dead-last at our first ever competition, I was completely hooked. This was the beginning of my obsession with robotics. I would go on to do 8 years of FIRST robotics, through 12th grade … Having seen my programmer-teammates code elaborate autonomous routines and automations for the robots I designed, I naturally became curious about the software that controlled the robots as well.

During the first visit to my friend’s house since the pandemic had started, the first thing I did was wash my hands. The first thing I noticed was the eye-catching shape of the water projecting from the faucet. While the sinks I had used for the past year emitted frothy, turbulent jets, the water in this sink fell over a flat edge and created a laminar cascade of water that appeared to take the shape of mutually orthogonal chain links.