Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is responsible for an estimated 17.9 million annual deaths. Myocardial infarction (MI), a prominent symptom of CVD, occurs when reduced blood flow causes heart muscle death. Since permanent damage to the heart muscle begins within 30 minutes of blood flow restriction, MI is extremely dangerous and time sensitive. Electrocardiogram (ECG) is one of the most efficient methods for MI detection; however, it requires expertise to identify characteristic waveform features and it is also prone to interobserver bias.

When a person goes to check on a skin lesion or a runner wants to improve their form, a scanner is often used to track points on the body for measurements. Currently, there exists no solution that can instantaneously (in less than a second) compute the location of all these points at once. MiniMesh is a novel, resource-efficient algorithm that can accomplish this task on a small computer (like a phone or laptop) in real time from a single image.

In today’s world, a robotic surgeon manually manipulates the robot via a console using joystick-like controllers. However, such manual methods of control require the surgeon to spend a significant amount of time performing routine but important tasks, such as suturing or tissue cutting, thousands of times over the course of a single surgery. By automating these tasks, we can improve the accuracy and efficiency of the surgery while also allowing the surgeon more time to focus on the more complex surgical tasks at hand.

Cancer is a leading cause of death worldwide, accounting for nearly one in six deaths, according to the World Health Organization (4). RAS genes (HRAS, NRAS, and KRAS in mammals) are the most frequently mutated oncogenes in human cancer and therefore, are considered one of the most important targets for anticancer therapy. (5). Acting as binary molecular switches, RAS genes alternate between a GDP (off) state and GTP (on) state. When in the GTP state, they transduce signals which regulate cell proliferation, differentiation, survival, and more (1).

After going to school in face masks during COVID-19, I began to contemplate their impact on human connection and how well people could recognize each other’s emotions behind the mask. My curiosity led me to investigate. In an online search, I discovered Dr. Felicity Bigelow’s study on facial emotion recognition in the scientific journal, Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, and I was immediately captivated. Her research aligned perfectly with my own interests, so I decided to reach out to her with my idea for an independent research project.

The origins of my research project start in my 10th grade AP Biology class. My teacher was lecturing on DNA and its biological function for storing cellular information, which she described as analogous to computer storage. It was an interesting analogy that I expanded on with genes being “files” stored in the genome “hard drive.” I eventually began to wonder if it was feasible to use DNA directly for computer storage, as after all it must possess incredibly high storage density to be viable for its biological purpose.

I began my journey into research in 10th grade (2020). Covid-19 was the style du jour, masks were all the rage, and I was enrolling in a class at my school called Science Research. This class was meant to guide students, helping them reach out to experienced mentors in academia and industry. Initially, I was tasked with finding a broad area of study, for example, cancer, in which I could later specify and find a niche that fit me precisely.

The introduction of computational techniques to analyze chemical data has given rise to the analytical study of biological systems, known as “bioinformatics”. One facet of bioinformatics is using machine learning (ML) technology to detect multivariable trends in various cases. Among the most pressing cases is predicting blood-brain barrier (BBB) permeability. The development of new drugs to treat central nervous system disorders presents unique challenges due to poor penetration efficacy across the blood-brain barrier.

The conditions of low-income living and the prevalence of discrimination have been long studied in African Americans; however, the Hispanic community has long been overlooked in this research, despite their parallel struggles with the pessimistic products of poverty. There is a knowledge gap in the study of adverse stimulation associated with incessant deprivation, bias, prejudice, and stereotypes applied to Hispanics/Latinos. This research focuses on how continuous struggles analogous to poverty affect the brain development and cognitive function of Hispanic children from Union City, NJ: the most densely populated city in the United States with the highest hispanic diaspora in the State of New Jersey.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

The inspiration for this project really comes from my undying love of music, and my inkling for finding scientific explanations for everything. My volunteering experiences especially inspired how I undertook this project. I’ve been volunteering as a music therapist in places like our local science museum as well as schools in India using my drumming. I’ve noticed that drums are very effective at reducing stress, improving motor skills, and focus-related tasks for children in particular, yet when it comes to professional auditory therapy, drums are neglected in favor of synthesized compositions like binaural beats.

As a rising freshman, I participated in the Optics Science Olympiad event. The experimental portion of the event particularly interested me. Given several optical devices, I was tasked with designing and executing an experiment that demonstrated a concept such as dispersion or refraction. This experience sparked my interest in optics. I volunteered as an assistant coach for the event in high school, where I gained a deeper understanding of the field through teaching others.

It was just another car ride home with my brother; I was the curious freshman asking difficult questions to the knowledgeable senior. Topic of the night: viruses. It seemed almost unfair, how viruses could inject their DNA into target cells and exploit them as host cells. I inquired further, “But Kevin, what if scientists could actually reprogram these viruses to artificially alter genomes?” He paused. “Hm … never thought of that.

Physicians in the US currently rely on two guidelines for asthma diagnostics: the EPR-3 and the GINA report. Due to the ten year difference in publication time, a comparison between both guidelines is necessary. Additionally, while the guidelines include defined parameters for impairment factors, patient-specific risk factors remain unparameterized. By parameterizing the risk factors and following a phenotype-oriented diagnostic approach, clinicians may be may be able to improve asthma diagnostics with respect to speed and accuracy consistency.

One weekend, I was out for a game of soccer with my friends. The temperature was a blazing 95?, and I began to feel light headed. I thought to myself: Why am I experiencing these symptoms? During halftime, I checked Google on my phone, and I learned that as I played, I excreted fundamental electrolytes, such as sodium, and water. However, I was only ingesting water, which resulted in a decrease in my body’s sodium levels, also known as hyponatremia.

That squirrel over there has a funny looking mouth because she is stuffing too many acorns into her cheeks. It’s not a knee-slapper but it makes you want to smile. And when your neighbor takes the garbage out and smiles at you, I bet you smile back. A smile is critical in communication. A lack of smiling can be symptomatic of autism, depression, and schizophrenia. My experiment investigated the difference between brain activity while a person smiles in an interaction with another person and the brain activity while a person smiles from a non-human stimulus.

Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is a chronic, autoimmune disease of the central nervous system (CNS) that affects millions of people globally. It targets the neurons of the CNS and destroys their myelin sheaths, or the fatty layer of insulation around them. This can lead to loss of motor function, deteriorating vision, loss of balance, and muscle weakness. In addition, recent studies have shown mounting evidence of crosstalk between the cellular pathways of MS and osteoporosis, a disease of the degeneration of bone and loss of bone density.

Preliminary diagnosis of lung cancer has led to countless cases of overtreatment due to false positive classifications made by physicians and radiologists. Most commonly, the misclassification of a benign pulmonary nodule (PN) as malignant from chest X-ray images initiates this process for patients. In the advent of promising machine learning and computer vision models, we investigate the optimization of benign and malignant PN classification using deep convolutional neural networks through transfer learning by fine tuning its convolutional layers.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A progressively neurodegenerative disease, Alzheimer’s disease presents a serious emotional and physical cost to patients and their families today. In industrialized countries, the increasing overall age of the population creates a large group of people at risk for Alzheimer’s disease, so it is imperative that a cure is developed soon. However, new treatments are often too large in size to cross the blood-brain barrier (BBB) and thus do not localize to regions of the brain well.

Nobel Prize winner Albert Szent-Gyorgyi said, Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different. It was a tenant of my high school research program, one which resonates with me deeply. This was one of many mantras instilled in me by that all-star teacher, Ms. Zeitlin. I learned the importance of looking beyond the journal, the lab bench, and the next deadline in scientific research .

I specifically studied lysosomal distribution in distal axons, or the parts of the axons that were further away from the cell body. I did so using microfluidic chambers which are devices that allow the physical separation of the cell body and the axons . . . Altogether, my research actually suggests that lysosomes are mobile, and can be recruited to degrade waste in neurons axons, instead of staying within the neuronal cell body.

Now here is something important. As I learned the hard way, doing research is very different from reading about it. Reading a paper could take, say 45 minutes, but the paper itself could easily contain years of work. What I’m getting at here is that producing good scientific research is rigorous and requires resilience, which is something you�ll have the opportunity to develop. So don’t feel distraught if you are struggling?

Human memory is undeniably variable. It is evident that no two people can have the exact same memory capacity? however, it is also palpable that a single person’s individual memory is extremely inconsistent. It has been shown that there are several factors that could account for such variation? for example, differences in a person’s memory across his or her lifespan could be accounted for by age and neuroplasticity, while differences across years could be accounted for by factors such as maturation and experience (Maylor 1998?

3DPrinters have slowly become more commonplace as they become cheaper and smaller. Makerspaces and libraries have made them more accessible for the average consumer to use, normally to print something small and made only of single colored plastic. 3Dprinters have become prominent in many fields, most notably, tissue engineering. My research focused on 3Dinkjet printers, which unlike most 3Dprinters use a liquid ink, not a plastic. This allowed me to use the 3Dprinter to create a specific shape while keeping the final product soft enough to resemble tissues and support cell growth.

More than half of all pregnancies in the United States are unintended. While some of these pregnancies are due to birth control method failures, most are due to unanticipated exposure. Emergency contraception is a postcoital contraception that allows women the possibility of preventing pregnancy in such cases. Currently, there are two types of FDA-approved emergency contraception: the coppercontaining intrauterine device (IUD) and oral emergency contraceptive pills. The most effective method for emergency contraception is the IUD at 99.

I’ve grown up surrounded by education. My mother is a bilingual speech therapist at a school in Upper Manhattan so I’ve seen the cogs and gears within the New York City public school system. However, my older brother is the one who sparked my interest in education and education policy. He started out with a public school education but by the time he reached high school he transferred to a private school specializing in an education for students with special needs.

Bioinformatics is a field that draws from mathematics, computer science, and engineering to develop biological understanding [26]. Bioinformatics uses many techniques and analyses to identify the biological mechanisms that underlie biological data. Bioinformatic analysis begins with data such as sequences of DNA, structural information about a protein, or measures of gene expression. Much of this data is available online in publicly accessible repositories. Using these repositories, researchers can apply various machine learning techniques to high-quality data without incurring the cost of generating the data themselves.

By Ien Li - Medicine One memory that resonates with me occurred the summer I turned twelve, when my family visited our home country, Taiwan, for the first time in a decade. There, amidst the elation of reunion, I also received staggering news: I had developed severe idiopathic scoliosis … It was in coming to terms with my struggle that I realized my passion for scientific research, a discipline that has allowed me to meet and collaborate with incredible scientists, and has pushed the boundaries of what I deemed achievable.

Research is very special for me. It is unequivocal that it has irrevocably changed my life, and it is my hope that by sharing my story, I might be able to demonstrate its transformative power … As a 10th grader, I couldn’t see past the street culture that my school community was awash with. Scientific research was just something in a textbook � drugs, gangbanging, fights, and pregnancies were the demanding reality in front of me.

When I was in the third grade, ten years ago, my mother constantly felt dizzy and tired. She finally sought medical attention and her blood was drawn for testing, but it wasn’t until a week later that she was told that her hemoglobin levels were so low that she had to go to the hospital immediately. After a stressful series of months following some procedures, including many more blood draws from my anemic mother, she recovered and was able to return to her normal activities … I became fascinated with the … optical properties of blood we could leverage to conduct a wider range of tests … My peers have informed me that the humanities are ever popular because “there’s more than one right answer,” so you can never be wrong.

Each year, nearly 800,000 people in the US suffer strokes. Of these, about 38%, or 300,000, experience some degree of aphasia, or loss of linguistic abilities … Regardless of symptoms, many aphasic patients show marked improvement over time, with some studies reporting up to 40% of patients recovering completely within a year of the stroke … In this project, I analyzed the differences in word use between well-recovered aphasic patients (those that perform well on the Western Aphasia Battery) and normal control subjects on a discourse task.

Synesthesia, he said, is the union of senses otherwise unconnected in a normal brain. He described Albert Einstein using shapes instead of numbers to complete mathematical algorithms, and briefly scoffed at the absurd idea of colored letters. Could it be that none of my classmates saw our teacher’s name in purple with flecks of sandy brown? Were As not inherently fire-truck red nor Z’s metallic gray? Didn’t everyone find it efficient to memorize phone numbers according to their unique color palates?

Although scientists do not yet fully understand how memories are formed, a protein called phosphodiesterase 4D (PDE4D) is clearly involved. Some children are born with mutated, damaged PDE4D, which results in a genetic condition called acrodysostosis. Kids with acrodysostosis typically have learning disabilities as well as short fingers, short toes, narrow faces, and short height. Currently there is no treatment for acrodysostosis, but this research shows it may be possible to use a small molecule to help mutated PDE4D and treat acrodysostosis.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I saw the letter E, big, black and bold. Now read me line six, the nurse said, pointing to a row of blurry rectangles. I squinted and took my best educated guess, but the nurse frowned, scribbling a note on her clipboard. The second week of first grade, I had failed my first test. The school vision test was the one (and usually only) exam I failed each year. It became somewhat of a routine, seeing the school nurse, squinting at the fuzzy shapes on the eye chart, finding myself in the optometrist’s office a week later.

My interest in cardiovascular health stems from a range of factors. There is currently a health epidemic in the United States: our largely unhealthy lifestyles, fatty and high-cholesterol diet, and lacking exercise, combine with genetic factors, contribute to some of the highest levels of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. In fact heart disease is prevalent in most developed and some developing countries, contributing to more deaths then cancer and HIV combined, worldwide.

Autism is a mental disorder that impairs the mental and social development of children on their way to adulthood. Not everyone with autism has the same severity of symptoms and therefore researchers refer to the variance of the disorder as autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). In recent years, there has been an increase in children diagnosed with autism (Groom, 2009). Reasons for such a peak in diagnoses range from a vaccine link to simply just more accurate methods of testing (Downs, 2009).

Autism is a mental disorder that impairs the mental and social development of children on their way to adulthood. Not everyone with autism has the same severity of symptoms and therefore researchers refer to the variance of the disorder as autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). In recent years, there has been an increase in children diagnosed with autism (Groom, 2009). Reasons for such a peak in diagnoses range from a vaccine link to simply just more accurate methods of testing (Downs, 2009).

How many times does a child hear his or her parent say, turn your phone off before going to bed or don’t sleep with your phone on next to you or stop texting at night because you won’t get enough sleep? I know I’ve heard those words countless times. But, I’ve always wondered if using my phone, or any other technological device, could actually hinder me from getting the best quality sleep I can get.

I always loved career day as an elementary student because I was able to share that my dad was a rocket scientist. Maybe he was not the astronaut flying into space or sitting in the control room, but I believed he had the coolest job because he was the engineer designing new space cameras . . . My passion for innovation was somewhat out of the ordinary because I was facing a challenge that was very real for me.

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 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 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.

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.

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.

Adolescents who exercise regularly are less likely to be overweight or obese. The population chosen is adolescents in the age group of 12 to 19. Adolescent overweight and obesity is very prevalent in the United States. Results of National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES, 2) 2003-04 study points out that 16% of adolescents nationwide are overweight. It is a huge human health issue because obesity increases the risk of serious health conditions like type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and high cholesterol.

I hear like an 85-year-old man, but I am not alone. Twenty-five million Americans are already affected by hearing loss (Hearing lost statistics), and this staggering number is expected to double by 2050 (qtd. in Schmid), especially considering how many students are currently damaging their ears by the combination of loud music and earphones. What they do not realize is that sound has a physical force that damages the stereocilia, the delicate hair cells in the cochlea that pick up vibrations.

Dengue fever affects 50-100 million people annually (Rigau, 1998). Scientists have recently developed genetic manipulation techniques to create transgenic mosquitoes refractory to disease transmission. The success of this strategy hinges on the dispersal of such genes throughout a population via matings of transgenic with wild-type mosquitoes. However, little is known about mating competitiveness of transgenic mosquitoes, or female mating patterns of mosquitoes in general . . . This study explored assortative mating of mosquitoes.

First noted in the United States in 1980, the obesity epidemic has since increased twofold in recent decades. In the 21st century, obesity has become one of the leading health problems in the United States; over 34% of all adults age 20 years and over and 18% of all children age 6-11 years are obese (CDC Faststats, Obesity and Overweight). In fact, obesity is more prevalent in the United States than in other Westernized country.

The economy, presidential election, and Middle Eastern affairs usually take the forefront in today’s media. However, looming behind the news of rising and falling gas prices is a most alarming domestic issue, namely the obesity epidemic. There has been an occasional eye-opener, such as the documentary “Super Size Me,” to force Americans to realize the enormity of this issue. Still, some Americans neglect to acknowledge the pounds accumulating directly onto their bodies.

Inflammation occurs when leukocytes (white blood cells) leave the blood stream by passing between endothelial cells, the cells that line the walls of blood vessels, and move into the surrounding tissue. Endothelial cells actively change shape to allow leukocytes to pass between them, but this requires an increase in surface area that would not normally be allowed by a cell membrane. To allow this shape change, extra membrane and molecules that assist in the migration of the leukocytes are released from a compartment in endothelial cells called the Lateral Border Recycling Compartment (LBRC).

All throughout my life, I have felt very strongly for those who suffer from Cerebral Palsy (A neural disorder that is marked by physical [such as spastic tendencies] and cognitive difficulties). That is why I volunteered at the Indian Institute of Cerebral Palsy in Kolkata, India during the summer of 2005. During my interactions and studies with these children, I saw that they really enjoy interacting with computers but did not have the proper means to do it, and I felt that Sharpgent software could aid them in their studies and careers tremendously.

Sickle cell anemia is an inherited disorder in which red blood cells become stiff and sickle-shaped. This condition is caused by defective hemoglobin that clusters together, forming long, rod-like structures. The abnormal red blood cells cannot freely move through small blood vessels and thus cause blockages that deprive organs and tissues of oxygen. A study published in 2003 established that the use of hydroxyurea therapy decreases mortality among sickle cell patients by forty percent and significantly reduces pain and acute chest crises.