I guess I was always meant to be a scientist. My aunt who used to babysit me could entertain me for hours with nothing but a glass of water, some spices, and a spoon. Performing my independent research, however, was the first time I ever did science for the purpose of helping others. My family does not have the best genes out there – we have a history of a variety of diseases that are so far untreatable . . . I decided that cancer therapy, and by extension all medical treatments, could be done better. My interest in biology narrowed to an interest in medicine, and I started to look for ways to get involved . . . Systemic Lupus Erythematosis (SLE or lupus) is a chronic autoimmune disease affecting 1.4 million Americans, 9 in 10 of whom are women according to Lupus.org Read more...
Pragmatically, the inspiration for this project is drawn from a series of backpacking excursion I embarked upon with my brother and father two years ago, which in the end totaled approximately 120 miles. Now the golden maxim of backpacking is to pack frugally. So, every day as I repacked my backpack, I would glare angrily at the extra weight of fire by friction set material I had to carry with me because it made the overall weight of my bag very onerous. Then, as I trudged along the trails throughout the day, I started to mull over the idea of possibly constructing the optimal fire by friction set. The more and more I thought about it the more and more that I wanted to find the answer to this curious concept. Subsequently, when my junior year started, I decided that I had to investigate this query of mine, so immediately started doing some background research. Read more...
Before high school, I was never the one whose favorite subject was science. I loved to hang out with friends, read, and write; a future in science had never particularly appealed to me. My first week of high school changed that. Through the Science Research Program at my school, I have been able to have the amazing opportunity to work in a cancer research laboratory at Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, NY, one full day a week, as well as 2-3 days after school, and 3-4 weeks during the summer. Before applying to and entering the program, I thought science was simply looking under a microscope at cells, a more complex version of what we did in biology class. Through my experience in the lab, science has become a portal to an unending source of knowledge, one that I know very little of. I’ve come to realize that science, the subject that never interested me, is really so cool. Read more...
I have long been fascinated by math, and more recently by biology. When my high school presented the opportunity to participate in research at a local university two years ago, I looked for a project that could help me see how the mathematics I learned in the classroom could be applied to help us better understand questions in biology . . . My advisor found Dr. David Eisenberg’s lab at the Molecular Biology Institute at UCLA, a lab studying, among other things, amyloid fibers and Alzheimer's disease. I was introduced to Dr. James Stroud, who had developed a method applying Bayes' theorem to data of amyloid fiber formation. With James' help, I began working on writing code to create realistic simulations to test and refine the method. By testing the method and improving it where possible, we created a method that can be used to analyze real data . . When I began working in the lab, I knew next to nothing about Bayes' theorem or amyloid fibers. Diving into the project meant learning things from an area of mathematics completely foreign to me, and simultaneously attempting to apply it to the real world. With a lot of help from my mentor, I came to understand and even contribute to the project. Read more...
My interest in physics was born rather serendipitously in middle school when I stumbled upon the popular physics section of my local library. In no time at all, I told you the qualitative details of Young's double slit experiment and how it contradicted certain previous classical notions of physics, but I could not have have taken a simple integral to save my life. So, due mostly to my lack of mathematical sophistication, I didn't do much physics until my junior year of high school. At that point, I realized that I could actually just go to the library, check out books, and learn math and physics on my own, which is exactly what I did. Although all of this self-learning was undoubtedly valuable, the one experience that was truly integral to reinforcing my interest in math and physics was the research project I conducted (and eventually submitted to both the Siemens and the Intel STS competitions) in the summer after my junior year . . . I conducted the research at the University of Maryland, in the Theoretical Quarks, Hadrons, and Nuclei group (TQHN). Naturally, I was really excited to be working on real problems in theoretical physics - problems I had previously only read about. My research, which I will discuss below, focused on Quantum Chromodynamics, which is a part of the Standard Model of particle physics that deals with quarks and their interactions . . Read more...
I wanted to work on something related to game theory. During my sophomore and junior years, I had bounced back and forth between various math concepts, but I always came back to game theory because it can describe interpersonal interactions in mathematical terms, an idea that was very intriguing to me. However, I looked for something beyond game theory’s most common applications, namely in economics, social psychology, and evolutionary biology. While searching for this new application of game theory, I noticed that cells, especially cancer cells, can behave strategically. The development of a malignant tumor requires the emergence of more aggressive subclones of cells. I imagined that during the development of malignancy, there must be some form of competition4 and cooperation5 among the tumor cells. Each individual cell can be a player with a strategy determined by its phenotype. With these thoughts in mind, I began researching the possibility of applying game theory to cancer. Read more...
Before I entered high school, my older brother returned from his lab each day with a story about his work. I could always hear his excitement when he talked about his project. I knew I wanted to try my hand at research but the microarray analysis procedures he described did not appeal to me. Volunteering then at a local hospital, I wanted to pursue a hands-on study of disease, but was unsure how to go about it. When I made the decision in the spring of 2008 to do summer research, I consulted one of my teachers; he recommended Dr. Carlos Simmerling’s lab, which specialized in computational structural biology at Stony Brook University. And in my first visit to the Simmerling Lab, I was fascinated by the work of two graduate students who were visualizing proteins folding on the computer. The computer offered such a controlled environment for studying biological systems. Working mostly with software tutorials my first summer there, I also found that any experiment required my input at every step—it was rewarding to have complete control. I soon began my own analysis of an enzyme in the tuberculosis (TB) pathogen. The freedom I had to study the complexities of TB under such controlled conditions inspired me to continue my project for the next three years. Read more...
I love working on conjectures. Just as in the various Mathematical Olympi- ads in which I have participated, the conditions are already set; the challenge consists in cleverly using the hypotheses of the problem to produce the conjectured conclusion. Number theory, the study of properties of the ordinary counting numbers 1; 2; 3; : : :, is particularly rich in this type of problems, which range from puzzles for the general audience to the challenges on the Interna- tional Mathematical Olympiad to famous conjectures, such as Fermat's Last Theorem and the Twin Prime Conjecture, which commonly remain unsolved for hundreds of years. My instincts told me that Conrad's problem would not be one of these enduring conjectures, and eagerly I set to work. Read more...
Four years ago, I began helping out at a school for children with autism: At the time, I saw this as an opportunity to give back to my community, with no idea that it would one day end up being the topic of my scientific research. I spent my time acting as both a volunteer and social mentor during summer programs, weekend trips, special events, and school days. A year later, my involvement with the autism community evolved as I began to recruit and organize students from my own high school to participate in volunteering and fundraising events for autism. By the third year, my junior year, I helped implement a program in my high school where teenagers with autism were brought into our building once every few weeks to have lunch with their neuro-typical peers . . . The original intent of such a program was to expose the kids with autism to appropriate social interaction, something many of them struggled with. The program turned out to have numerous other benefits; for one, it opened the eyes of my own peers to the hardships that people with disabilities face. Additionally, it was this program that first got me thinking that autism might be the perfect fit for the topic of my research. Observing the interactions between the teenagers with autism and their neuro-typical peers, I quickly noticed their seemingly deficient ability to gauge the emotions of the people to whom they were talking. As one would imagine, this makes maintaining a conversation substantially more difficult. These observations all happened around the time during which I was focused on developing a research project, so I decided I’d look into the current literature to determine whether what I’d been witnessing was a legitimate, documented problem for children with autism. And I found that, in many cases, it was. Read more...
The public’s perception of the President of the United States has been a widely studied aspect in American politics since the birth of the nation in the eighteenth century. In recent years, with the inception of the 24-hour news cycle as a prevalent social characteristic, political scientists have deliberately analyzed the potential effects of the news media and its portrayal of the president on the public’s approval of him (Cohen, 2000; Wolf & Holian, 2006; Woessner, 2005; Schiffer, 2009; Cohen, 2004). These studies have concluded that issue saliency and media biases do have a significant effect under certain conditions; when considering an issue that is not salient, and presenting it to persons with little previous knowledge of political affairs, the news media can have a significant effect on the public. But when a salient issue is presented to a politically knowledgeable public with predisposed affiliations, the media effect on presidential approval becomes minimal . . . The majority of these studies, however, does not theorize on the effects of negative media portrayal, but rather focuses on basic media priming, issue salience, and their effect on public opinion. In fact, a long-held assumption of media influence is that when the news media portrays the President in a negative light, his approval ratings drop significantly. Interestingly, however, it has been suggested that this common hypothesis is possibly a misconception. Read more...
My very first science fair project, completed in the spring of my seventh grade year, dealt with the harmful effects of acid rain on a variety of common transition metals. This project laid the foundation of my dual interests in inorganic transition metal chemistry and the environmental applications of chemistry. One year later, my research switched gears towards the medical applications of transition metal chemistry. I devised an original recipe for baking powder by eliminating a standard ingredient, sodium aluminum sulfate, which has been identified as a possible chemical trigger of Alzheimer’s disease, and replacing it with a variety of transition metal compounds that are essential to the body. Entering high school, I naturally wanted to combine my interests in both environmental and medical issues while still focusing on the area of inorganic/transition metal chemistry . . . I was pointed in the direction of green chemistry, a sub-field of chemistry that combined my two interests perfectly. Green chemistry, at its core, is a field aimed at creating, from the ground up, specialized catalysts, chemical agents, reactions, and other processes that minimize or even eliminate toxicity and harm to the environment and human health. Given these ambitious aims, a large part of green chemistry involves novel synthesis of various compounds that can potentially end up as important catalysts in a variety of important reactions. This is the “vein” of green chemistry my project fell into: the synthesis of novel complexes (and useful catalysts) using the metal rhodium. The catalytic activity of the complexes was discovered after a series of tests, and I found them especially pertinent to pharmaceutical synthesis reactions. Read more...
Despite the changes in custom and language that occurred simultaneously in my life as I moved from South Korea to America, math was the one thing that made me feel secure and confident. Math provided me with a sense of direction through the confusion and cultural difference I had to overcome. Therefore, I began to devote my time to mathematics, taking advantage of all the research opportunities that were available in the field . . . I had not initially held an interest in astrophysics, but this project helped me develop a new inquisitiveness. This project introduced me to a realm of science that captured my attention from the start. It is a type of science that cannot be physically observed but has tremendous effects on life on Earth: nuclear physics. Read more...
Most people cannot deny having procrastinated at some time; almost everyone can sympathize with the desire to delay working on an uninviting task. As a high school student, I have seen the extent to which both my peers and I postpone our work, putting off assignments until “crunch time” when we rush to get it done. Empirical studies have largely classified procrastination as a maladaptive trait, as it has been correlated with irritation, regret, self-condemnation, low self-esteem, despair, test anxiety, and lower GPAs (Burka & Yuen, 2008; Ferrari, Johnson, & McCown, 1995; Ferrari, 1998; Lay, Edwards, Parker, & Endler, 1989; Schouwenburg & Lay, 1995, Schraw et al, 2007, Tice & Baumeister, 1997) – though I was well-acquainted with these findings long before I read about them in scientific journals. Experiences with all-nighters, avoidable typos in papers that were not given the time to be properly proofread, and stress caused by piles of work left until Sunday night had taught me first-hand about the dangers of procrastination. Yet I could never explain to myself why I dawdled in beginning my work – it was simply a habit I had grown to accept. And for that reason, I began my research to understand why students procrastinate. Procrastination is something so common and relatable, yet something that we rarely take the time to understand – and I wanted to change that. Read more...
My first task was to come up with a project idea. I have always loved statistics, so I wanted to do a project involving a lot of data and statistical analysis. I began looking on the internet to find some current research that was being conducted. I came across a man who was working with historical data. The data set that he was working with was ship log data taken by Benjamin Franklin to observe the Gulf Stream. In his possession, this man also had a data set by a less well known British colonist named Phineas Pemberton. I spoke with this man on the phone, and met with him at his office in New York City, where he told me more about the data set, and I became very interested. The data was taken in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the mid to late 1700s. This data is so significant because currently, if a climate scientist wants to do an investigation involving temperature data, they only have reliable data through the mid to late 1800s, so this data set would open up an additional 100 years of data. This is very significant, because the farther back into the climate history we can go, the better the trends that can be noticed, and then the better the predictions that can be made for the future. Read more...
As global warming becomes more apparent, the effects of temperature on living organisms are causing great concern. However, most information regarding the impact of rising temperature on life is descriptive and inexact. Along with AP Calculus, I took AP Biology my sophomore year and was fascinated by the idea of emergent properties, the idea that life is not a simple sum of its respective parts; interactions between the different levels of biology create emergent properties that cause, for example, a cell to behave differently from a mixture of its component molecules. I wondered how increasing temperature affects organisms, particularly bacteria, and how its effect on organisms differs from its effect on the chemical reactions that the organism is composed of . . .The impacts of global warming have significant implications for the fate of our globe. Increased temperature will harm plants and animals in the sea and force animals and plants on land to search for new habitats. Climate change will cause flooding, drought and an increase in the number of damaging storms . . . Read more...
University of Chicago
Professor David Mazziotti
Editor