2024 Category Awards

2024 Winners

Animal Sciences

Senior Division

• First Place: WHY IS THE MARE ACTING LIKE A STALLION: NOVEL TESTS TO DIAGNOSE GRANULOSA CELL TUMOR (GCT)

• Second Place: The Effects of Withanone and Gingeral on Cancer Cell Mortality in Mercenaria mercenaria: A Novel Invertebrate Model for Targeting Protein-Protein Interactions in Leukemia

• Third Place: Coop Culture: A Comparative Analysis of Conventional and Innovative Housing Techniques on Broiler Chicken Growth

Junior Division

• First Place: Finding Planaria’s Perfect Supplement: Studying the Effects of Vitamins on Planarian Regeneration

• Second Place: Palaemon Paludosus as Bioindicators

• Third Place: Tiny Bacteria, Big Sand Shrimp Problem?

Behavioral and Social Sciences

Senior Division

• First Place: Prevention of Gun Violence through the buffering effects of Intellectual Humility in Traumatized Psychopaths

• Second Place: The Future of DSM: A State of the Art, Machine Learning Approach to Depression Diagnosis From Remote Clinical Interviews via Multimodal Neural Networks and Large Language Models

• Third Place: An Artificially Intelligent System for Early Detection of Developmental Speech and Language Disorders in Children

Junior Division

• First Place: Can Positive Peer Mentorship Improve Anxiety?

• Second Place: Understanding Domestic Adoption of Superworms for Polystyrene Recycling

• Third Place: Spark – A Novel Application Designed for the Aid of Alzheimer’s Patients Through the Use of Facial Recognition, Slowing Cognitive Deficits and Efficiently Prompting Memory

Biochemistry

Senior Division

• First Place: Targeting Amyloid-β Plaques: In Silicon Protein Modeling of Novel Antibody for Halting Alzheimer’s Disease Progression

• Second Place: Development of Novel Early-Diagnostic Methodology for Glioblastoma and Alzheimer’s Disease

• Third Place: Understanding the Effects of Methamphetamine and Similar Stimulants on Contracting Cerebral Cavernous Malformation Symptoms

Junior Division

• First Place: Silvered Nano-Trash: Novel Applications of Silver Nanoparticles Derived from Spent Coffee Grounds Utilizing Green Synthesis Technology

• Second Place: Enzymes Solve Plastic Problems

• Third Place: Solution to Lactose Intolerance

Biomedical and Health Sciences

Senior Division

• First Place: Development of a Accessible pH-Monitoring Wound Dressing for Early Detection of Surgical Site Infections

• Second Place: A Novel Gene Signature for Advancing Breast Cancer Detection Using Liquid Biopsy

• Third Place: Preclinical Investigation to Develop Anti-platelet and Cholesterol lowering agent for Prevention and Treatment of Stroke

Junior Division

• First Place: Automatic Diabetic Retinopathy Screening

• Second Place: Detecting Early Signs of Alzheimer’s Using Deep Learning Models

• Third Place: Chlorine Levels in Different Types of Eggs and its Importance in Cognitive Function

Biomedical Engineering

Senior Division

• First Place: NitinArm: Engineering a Lighter and Cheaper Trans-Radial Prosthetic with Nitinol to Increase Dexterity

• Second Place: Using Thermoactive Soft Actuators to Replicate Muscular Movement for the Application of Human Prosthetics

• Third Place: Using Machine Learning to Diagnose Morphological Abnormalities of Blood Samples to Diagnose Leukemia and Malaria

Junior Division

• First Place: Novel Application of Olfactory Sensor Arrays in the Detection of Food and Environmental Allergens, Using Artificial Intelligence

• Second Place: Myopia: The Ciliary Muscle Training App

• Third Place: BAND AI-ID

Cellular and Molecular Biology

Senior Division

• First Place: Tartrazine Dysregulates Retrotransposons and p53 Expression in Drosophila melanogaster

• Second Place: Selenoprotein O Protects Against Oxidative Stress and Incorporates Various Nucleotides in AMPylation

• Third Place: Identifying the Molecular Link Between Endoplasmic Reticulum Morphology and Divalent Magnesium Cation Signaling Through Protein Sequence Similarity Search Tools and Phylogenetic Analysis

Junior Division

• First Place: Dirty Daphina: Investing the effects of water pollution on Daphnia Magna

• Second Place: The changes in Strawberry DNA Throughout Different Growth Phases

• Third Place: Creating Artificial Trees to Combat Climate Change

Chemistry

Senior Division

• First Place: From Crown to Current: Engineering Cellulosic Fiber-Based Battery Cells – A Safe and Scalable Alternative to Lithium Technology

• Second Place: Shocking Chemistry: Nitrogen Fixation Via a Plasma Reactor

• Third Place: Unveiling the Beauty of a Cleft-Shaped Pyridyl Amidothiourea Ligand: A Highly Selective and Sensitive Fluorescent Chemosensor for Zinc(II) Ion Detection

Junior Division

• First Place: Radioactivity with a Cloud Chamber

• Second Place: Crime Scene Chemistry:Chemiluminescence of Luminol

• Third Place: Factors Affecting Enzyme Catalysis in the Catalase Enzyme via Yeast

Computational Biology and Bioinformatics

Senior Division

• First Place: BioVision: A Novel In-Silico Drug Discovery Pipeline to Predict Drug Candidates for Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer

• Second Place: Decoding Imagined Speech: Using a Convolutional Neural Network to Classify Subvocalized Letters Collected Non-invasively by an Electroencephalogram

• Third Place: Diagnosing Neurodegenerative Pathologies using Image-Recognition in CNN

Junior Division

• First Place: Detecting Stripe Rust in Wheat Plants using Machine Learning

• Second Place: Gait Guardian: An IMU-Based Approach to Aid in Early Detection of Parkinson’s Disease

• Third Place: The correlation of brain cancer rates and the use of bluetooth headphones

Earth and Environmental Sciences

Senior Division

• First Place: Acoustic Filtration: Harnessing Ultrasonic Technology for the Streamlined Removal of Microplastic Particles from Water Flow

• Second Place: Effects of Climate Change on the Upper Rio Grande Basin

• Third Place: Predicting Seasonal Atlantic Hurricane Activity Utilizing Climatic Patterns and a Machine-Learning Approach

Junior Division

• First Place: From Landfill to Lab – Unveiling the Biodegradable Potential of Everyday Materials for Packaging

• Second Place: The Effects of Substrates on Zophobas Morio Biodegradation of Polystyrene

• Third Place: Iron Laden: The Effect of Ferrofluidic Blankets on Subsurface Water Temperature

Embedded Systems

Senior Division

• First Place: CapLink: A Novel LoRa based Water Leak Detection System Utilizing Paintable Sensors

• Third Place: Giving Robot Hands a Feeling

Junior Division

• First Place: AElectrifying Footsteps

• Second Place: Data at the Speed of Light

• Third Place: A temporally calibrated infrared thermometric method for detecting ocean-surface microplastics

Energy: Sustainable Materials & Design

Senior Division

• First Place: DynaCap: A Dynamic Wheel Cover System for Improving the Range and Performance While Reducing CO2 Emissions from Automobiles

• Second Place: “The Bionic Leaf”: Developing a Novel Bi-Functional Nickel Oxide Catalyst to Use With the Bacterium Ralstonia eutropha for Artificial Photosynthetic Systems

• Third Place: Using Shewanella oneidensis with Activated Carbon and Graphite Electrodes to Optimize Energy Capture Efficiency from Microbial Fuel Cell Processes

Junior Division

• First Place: Bio-Power 2: How Soil Additives Affect Microbial Power Generation

• Second Place: The Better Wind Turbine

• Third Place: Flowing Towards Efficiency: Investigating the Impact of Fluid Flow Rate on Geothermal Heat Transfer

Engineering Technology: Statics and Dynamics

Senior Division

• First Place: Exploring Eutectic Alloys in Microgravity: Advancing Space-Based Manufacturing through Controlled Freezing

• Second Place: | BLA Wing: Boundary Layer Adhesion Prototype to Minimize Aircraft Stalling via Wind Tunnel Testing Apparatus

• Third Place: ArmAssist: A Lightweight, Concealable Active Arm Support that Empowers Individuals Suffering From Muscle Atrophy

Junior Division

• First Place: Modifying the Bass Drum Pedal for the Disabled

• Second Place: Year 2: Side Impact Car Crash – Designing the various systems involved in External Airbag, eSRS (external Supplementary Restrain System), for collision energy dissipation

• Third Place: Turbine Innovation

Environmental Engineering

Senior Division

• First Place: Sustainable Bee Keeping Project – Sensor-assisted monitoring for operational, investigative, and predictive hive health management for honeybee colonies

• Second Place: Use of Chlorite Dismutase Enzymes to Reduce Methane Emissions from Landfills

• Third Place: Autonomous Precision Agricultural System

Junior Division

• First Place: Stabilizing Soil to Reduce Potential Building Foundation Movement by Using Sustainable Additives

• Second Place: Sycamore Seed Inspired Fan Blade Design for a Portable Air Purifier

• Third Place: Development of a Viable,Cost-effective,Sustainable,and pontential solution to Heavy Metal Pollution in water

Materials Science

Senior Division

• First Place: Engineering a Greener Future: A Novel, Biodegradable, Self-Powered, Chitosan-Based Food Packaging Material

• Second Place: Fabrication of a radiopaque resorbably polymer for medical device development

• Third Place: Molybdenum Doped BiVO4 Thin Films in Gas Sensing application

Junior Division

• First Place: Define the Damage

• Second Place: agri-Q: A study of the efficacy of novel, biopolymer-based hydrogels for agricultural use

• Third Place: GO WITH THE FLOW

Mathematics

Senior Division

• First Place: Symmetry, fixed points and quantum billiards: A confluence of ideas

• Second Place: Computing the Fourth Moment of Generalized Kloosterman Sums

• Third Place: A Race Against Time: A Hybrid, Efficient Multiplication Algorithm Utilizing Crossover Points

Junior Division

• First Place: Find the total number of different ways from A to B

• Second Place: Using Machine Learning To Test The Effects Of Changing Fire Conditions On Wildfire Behavior

• Third Place: Get More Goals: Data’s Secrets

Microbiology

Senior Division

• First Place: Ketones produced by Bacillus subtitles Bacteria: Assessing Inhibition and Morphological Changes on Deadly Bat Fungus, Psuedogymnoascus destructans

• Second Place: p14 Viral Fusogen-Aided CAR T Immunotherapy: A Novel Approach to Solid Tumor Heterogeneity and Antigen Escape

• Third Place: Phage-Mediated Inhibition of Type IV Pili: Disrupting the Competence System and Mitigating Antibiotic Resistance in Streptococcus pneumoniae

Junior Division

• First Place: Patching Ozone Holes With Bacteria

• Second Place: Project

• Third Place: The Rise of Thermotolerant Pathogenic Fungi

Physics and Astronomy

Senior Division

• First Place: Kelvin-Helmholtz Instability: Studying the Effects of Density and Velocity on Vortex Formations

• Second Place: PCN: A Deep Learning Approach to Jet Tagging Utilizing Novel Graph Construction Methods and Chebyshev Graph Convolutions

• Third Place: AI Detection Use in Gravitational Microlensing Techniques: A Novel Utilization of Artificial Intelligence for Gravitational Microlensing Detection and Dark Matter Discoveries

Junior Division

• First Place: Spectral properties of smart phone facial recognition

• Second Place: Evaluating Various ML Models to Efficiently Uncover Exoplanets

• Third Place: Unveiling Harmonics: An Exploration of Hidden Notes in Tanpura

Plant Sciences

Senior Division

• First Place: Aqua-Arsenic Remediation: Analysis of the Oryza sativa meta genome and Wet-Lab Approach to Increase O. sativa Tolerance to Drought and Arsenic through Hyperexpression of Aquaporin genes OsNIP2;1, OsNIP3;2 and OsPIP2;2

• Second Place: Urban Air Pollution Mitigation: Dust-Phytoremediation and Impact on Plant Physiology, Anatomy, and Biochemistry

• Third Place: Investigating the Potential of Surplus Abscistic Acid (ABA) to Mitigate the Effects of the Bacterial Pathogen, Agrobacterium tumafaciens, in in-vitro fertilization of Rosa hybrids L

Junior Division

• First Place: Wild Wildflowers Year 4: The Effects of Natural Fertilizers on the Germination of Wild Flowers

• Second Place: Electroculture

• Third Place: Analyzing the Morphological and Growth Responses of Brassica Juncea During Lead Compound Salt Phytoextraction

Robotics and Intelligent Machines

Senior Division

• First Place: Easy AED: An Autonomous VTOL Emergency Equipment Delivery Drone System

• Second Place: An Eye-Controlled Wheelchair(ECW): Design and Development of a Novel, Non-Invasive and Cost-Effective Human-Computer Interface(HCI) for Patients with Motor Neuron Disease

• Third Place: Swimguard: An Intelligent Drone with Deep Learning Capabilities for Lifeguard and Coach Assistance through Swimmer Pose Recognition

Junior Division

• First Place: AssistBot: Service and Companion Robot for the Elderly, Lonely, and Impaired

• Second Place: Using Convolutional Neural Networks to Classify Alzheimer’s Stages

• Third Place: Vibration Fire Alarm for the Audio Impaired

Systems Software

Senior Division

• First Place: Developing Epileptic Activity and Trigger Content Detection Software using a Computer-Based Application for Real Time Monitoring and Seizure Reporting

• Second Place: HM-Detect: A New Method for Murmur Detection and Classification Using Signal Processing and Sound Feature Analysis

• Third Place: Using AI and Deep Learning for Early and Accurate Detection of Agricultural Disease

Junior Division

• First Place: Quantum Safeguard: Transforming Digital Security with Cutting-Edge Lattice-Based Encryption Strategies

• Second Place: Lives Saved, Minutes Matter: An AI App for Faster Pneumonia Diagnosis

• Third Place: STEMI-Stat: Reducing treatment delay in critical heart attack patients via an ML and location service integrated app

Translational Medical Sciences

Senior Division

• First Place: Utilizing Indoyanine Green and Sodium Alginate with Microsphere Drug Delivery and Infrared Imaging: A Model to Create More Accessible Therapeutic Diagnostic Tools for Cardiovascular Disease and Cancer

• Second Place: Utilizing Planarian Neoblast Stem Cells and Starfish Neural Networks on Lumbricus Terrestrial as a Model Organism to Investigate Possible Cures and Preventative Measures for Central Nervous System (CNS) Disorders

• Third Place: The Therapeutic Potential of Suppressing Chemokine Receptor CXCR4 Pathway Components in Small Cell Lung Cancer (SCLC) Through First-Generation Potent Inhibitors

Junior Division

• First Place: Boosted Biotics with Microbial Alchemy: A Low Cost, Scalable, Translational Approach to Propagate Probiotic Supplements in Fermented Food Matrices to Mitigate Malabsorption in Developing Countries

• Second Place:  Validation of a Self-Monitoring Tool for Early Glaucoma Detection

• Third Place: Can Black Seed Oil Work as Efficiently as Common Antacids?