Although I began studying physics at school in the 7th grade, my interest in the subject came largely from reading popular science books. One such book was called Einstein for Everyone; a slim volume, it provided a non-technical rundown of all of the major areas in modern physics, from atomic physics all the way `up' to cosmology. I was particularly intrigued with the book's description of quantum mechanics --- the thought of `Schrodinger's cat' being both alive and dead simultaneously was fascinating to me, as was the notion that measuring something could change the outcome ... In quantum mechanics, the state of a system can be fully represented by its wave function. Knowledge of the wave function of a quantum system serves as a direct means to predict the outcome of a measurement on an observable of that system. The ability to accurately determine the wave function of a possibly unknown quantum state is, therefore, of fundamental importance... Read more...
Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been both fascinated and frightened by that full range of malicious, deadly human diseases that have no cure. The possibility of one’s body turning against itself, waging war on its own cells and disrupting the complex biological processes that keep us healthy terrified me. I found the best way to confront my fears was to simply learn what causes debilitating diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s disease—what goes wrong in our body to cause these horrible maladies, and why. Somehow, learning about the purely technical, scientific aspects behind the pathogenesis of these diseases helped to erode my sense of powerlessness. I became hopeful and naturally progressed to thinking about cures. I indulged my growing curiosity by getting my hands dirty and reading esoteric abstracts, which, with lots of help from Google, I gradually became able to understand ... Pharmacological chaperones are orally administered small molecules that, when bound to a misfolded protein, revert the misfolding process. To discover pharmacological chaperones for specific protein targets, knowledge of the 3D structure of the protein is required to identify exosites for the chaperone to bind to. Even then, most misfolded proteins do not possess natural binding sites. This project aims to find the structural analogues of ligands of misfolded proteins that can function as pharmacological chaperones. Using Java, I developed a classifier based on the support vector machine learning model to predict the structural similarity between two molecules using 2D molecular descriptors that function as similarity metrics. Read more...
Cancer is a very elusive subject; my textbooks would often place approach the topic with a disclaimer that our knowledge of cancer was evolving. And through this, I became aware that though the collection of data itself is rigorous and exact, the actual formation of hypotheses and methods to test them is an unsure process. Specifically, the results we receive can be surprising and, at times, disappointing. I had many trips in the road during my first official laboratory experience. Learning the basic research techniques as well as the process of documenting everything made me feel again like a baby learning to walk ... Breast cancer continues to be one of the most prevalent of cancers, acting as the “leading cause of cancer-related death for women worldwide” (DeSantis et al., 2015); current treatments of breast cancer include surgery, radiotherapy, and medication. In this study, a novel drug that targets the tumor by inhibiting cell proliferation is being examined. One of the hallmarks of cancer is unlimited proliferation. Cancer cells ignore signals that in normal cells maintain a consistent balance of growth and replication (Hanahan and Weinberg, 2011). This developing treatment, by inhibiting cell proliferation, is ridding breast cancer cells of a key factor and facilitating possible clearance of the tumor cells ... Read more...
Being part of research is such an amazing experience. You only need to be passionate about something and excited to learn more and willing to do the work. Research can be difficult sometimes – after all, experiments are learning experiences, and things don’t always go as planned – but it’s definitely worth it. You get to learn from a new perspective and actually contribute to what you’re learning about; you can find new interests or further ones you already have. Either way, it’s really interesting. Whether you want to join a lab or do field work, focus on STEM or a humanity, there are tons of ways to get involved in research. So, if you get the chance, take it ... The purpose of this study was to determine the relationship between the rs53576 single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) and stress management in high school students. I’d hypothesized that individuals with the G variation of the SNP would be more capable of managing stress than those with the A variation. Saliva samples were collected from 22 participants and used to analyze cortisol levels and DNA. Participants also completed surveys and Perceived Stress Scales in order to determine the various factors contributing to their stress ... Read more...
“The parents didn’t send their kids because there was a male teacher!” Scoffing at the absurdity, my disgruntled father strolled into the house, booming with another story to share from his after-school program. As an elementary educator, he fills up our conversations at the dinner table about his daily interactions with the students and their parents; my usual routine consists of quiet nods and smiles. But this particular story got me curious. Thinking back to my own elementary days, I tried to remember my previous male classroom teachers and could only name one. Perhaps this is an anomaly! But, devoured by wonder, I later scoured Google for answers and encountered a shocking statistic: men only represent about ten percent of elementary school teachers nationwide. Only. Ten ... Little is known about the effect of gendered traits on perceptions of male elementary educators. This paper presents the results of two experiments to fill this void. Experiment 1 explored the influence of gendered traits and teacher gender on perceptions of elementary educators. Participants (N = 246) were randomly assigned to view websites that varied gendered traits (communal, neutral, agentic) and teacher gender. When choosing a teacher for their child, individuals preferred either neutral or communal teachers to agentic teachers ... Read more...
During an evening quantum computing seminar at Portland State University, Professor Marek Perkowski discussed the relatively new area of quantum machine learning. As the lecture continued, I gradually realized that I had come across a field with an ideal intersection between my passions for mathematics and machine learning. Following this seminar, I started reading published works in the field which introduced quantum analogs of algorithms ranging from support vector machines to k-nearest neighbors ... My proposed quantum machine learning algorithm is a novel approach which converts the learning samples into an incompletely specified Boolean function for classification problems. An incompletely specified Boolean function is a function with multiple “don’t know” values (values which are not covered by the training data) along with values “0” or “1” corresponding to negative and positive decisions, respectively. A complex system can have multiple incompletely specified Boolean functions to handle multiple inputs and outputs. A new Kronecker Reed-Muller (KRO) spectral transform, to convert the Boolean function into a KRO form, is used to minimize such functions (i.e. with as many zero spectral coefficients as possible). Spectral coefficients are defined as the constants corresponding to each product term in a KRO form. There are a total of 3-to-the-n KRO forms (informally proven in Section 2.2) and the proposed algorithm is able to identify the exact minimum expression out of all such forms which cover each “don’t know” for a function of n input variables ... Read more...
My advice to high school students looking to work on a research project that combines science and mathematics is to be invested in learning a lot of new things and keep an open mind—as high schoolers, there’s a lot of mathematics we are unfamiliar with, and sometimes it’s easy to get overwhelmed. However, I would say that the beauty of combined science and math research is that you learn so much about mathematical theory that can be applied to the science—a double-pronged approach, if you will! It’s a fantastic opportunity, and with an open mind and willingness to learn it becomes that much better and more rewarding ... This research describes how a concentrically embedded bubble alters the surface wave of a suspended viscous drop. The analysis considers small amplitudes of the interfacial pulsation so that the nonlinear convective terms can be neglected in the flow equation. The consequent linearized system is represented by a matrix formulation which predicts the natural frequencies and decay constants for different modes of oscillation. The involved matrices have a block diagonal structure separating the deformational and rotational groups. The presented work includes the mathematical derivations for both groups proving that the former manifests both oscillating and decaying features while the latter only exhibits monotonic decrease. The results reveal the variation in decay constants with bubble-drop size-ratio for different rotational modes ... Read more...
When I was in sixth grade, I first became aware of my family history of heart disease. My dad battling chronic hypertension, close relatives passing away from heart failure, and me knowing that I could be next in line ... During my freshman year of high school, my curiosity to investigate better heart disease therapies drove me to take honors biology. I was especially intrigued by our discussion of the incredible healing potential of pluripotent stem cells. Eager to learn more, I decided to take a summer class in biotechnology at the University of Pennsylvania, through the Summer Academy of Applied Science and Technology ... As I began to code my algorithm, I found myself exploring the exciting interface between biology and vector calculus. I realized that, by thinking of a tissue contracting as a point being displaced in the cartesian coordinate system, I could make the problem of identifying contractile force magnitude and direction much simpler. Thinking about displacement immediately called to mind vectors, which I had just learned about in my junior year multivariable calculus class. As I reviewed the literature for previous attempts at modeling tissue contractions using vectors, I encountered a paper from UCSF that employed vector fields to represent tissue displacement. Read more...
One of the best presents I have ever received was a book entitled Girls Think of Everything on the day of my fifth grade graduation. Girls Think of Everything chronicles various women who have made world changing scientific discoveries. This book inspired my clueless, ten year old self to one day have such an impact on the world. Thus my passion for research began and has continued to influence my high school and college interests. During high school, I worked on two main research projects. I began the first project as a freshman in high school and studied the effects of synthetic estrogens on human health as well as the environment. The second research project used a theoretical chemistry approach to investigate the Marcus Model and in vivo electron transfer ... During a shopping trip, I was tasked with buying baby bottles for my pregnant cousin. While looking at the different options, I noticed that some bottles were labelled “BPA Free” and some were not. I was not sure what “BPA” meant, but after a quick internet search I learned that it is an acronym for bisphenol A, an endocrine disrupting compound that has been linked to cancer, developmental issues, diabetes, and cardiovascular diseases. I was surprised to discover that BPA is not only present in baby bottles but is a common ingredient in many consumer goods including polycarbonate plastic (e.g. reusable water bottles), epoxy resins, receipt paper, eyeglasses, and compact discs. The compound’s ubiquity has also led to environmental contamination, especially in bodies of water ... Read more...
Economics was a subject I first discovered in high school—a class that all students were required to take which inexplicitly became my favorite class of the year. I was enthralled by the idea of using mathematics to model the behavior of individuals and firms across the country. Until I met my mentor Professor Cheng-Zhong Qin, that is how I saw economics: a collection of simple and elegant theories that described all of economic activity. In truth, however, the complexities of the modern economy far outpace the mainstream theories economists use to describe it, most of which were developed before the mid-20th century. The great struggle of the next generation of economic researchers is not to develop new theories, but to adapt existing theory to the 21st century. Only this process can reconcile the original goal of economics—to be a model of the global economy—with the realities of our world ... Cross-holdings exist when one business holds a non-voting stake in a direct competitor. Because these stakes are non-voting, they are allowed under current antitrust regulations; since sales are unaffected, they also fail to affect the HHI. However, recent economic literature has established that cross-holdings have a substantial impact on competition. In fact, in extreme scenarios it is possible for a multi-firm industry with cross-holdings to operate indistinguishably from a pure monopoly ... Our project has two parts: first, we use conditions of Cournot Equilibrium (a special case of oligopoly) to derive a generalized form of the HHI, which we call the Generalized Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (GHHI) ... Read more...
University of Chicago
Professor David Mazziotti
Editor