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Browse project ideas by Polygence mentors
Plastic Pollution
A Bic ballpoint pen will exist in the landscape for 50,000 years after it was discarded. That's just one pen. Multiply that by all the discarded plastic in the world. We have a problem. Floating masses of discarded plastic interfere with the life cycles of many oceanic species. Our dumps are filling faster than we can find new places to dump our plastic trash. Poorer nations frequently become our new dumping ground. And these nations dispose of the plastic in ways that damage not just their environment but other environments as well when the plastic is thrown in a river. It damages the river and, some day, when the river meets the sea, it will damage the ocean. Good ways to repurpose discarded plastic are being invented every day. Or should we ban the manufacture of plastic until we can get a handle on the already-discarded mass?
Finance
Should We Protect Endangered Species?
Many species are at or near the brink of extinction for many reasons-- human interference with their life cycles and climate change altering habitat. In the history of our planet, many species have become extinct without any interference from humans. You could say their time has simply come. On the other hand, when humans are the direct cause of a declination of a species, do humans have a duty to ameliorate that decline? Or should we just let them die out and move on? From a scientific standpoint, restoration of an endangered species' habitat seems to work the best. Sometimes relocation to a more suitable habitat works as well. Perhaps we could clone them and reintroduce them to the same or a similar habitat such as cloning mastodons and reintroducing them to Siberia. All these possibilities raise the question of the extent of human's duty to restore, and then selecting an appropriate methodology. Or do we just conclude that species extinction is part of the natural process and we should not intervene?
Finance
Environmental Restoration For Fun and Profit
It is no secret that humans have caused damage to our environment. Some of the damage is irreparable but some of it isn't, i.e., an environmental restoration project can be initiated that restores the biological and chemical functions of the environment. It is certainly a scientific issue to design a project that meets these goals but the project will need a financial sponsor. If the "guilty" party can be found, governments can assess the cost of the restoration directly. When the guilty party cannot be located, governments usually step in and foot the bill. There is a third way to raise the money for a project: if the negative damage can be accurately measured, a project that zeroes out the damage by positive restoration can be built with the units of restoration being sold for a profit to other guilty parties, many of whom had no part in the damage to the project's environment. This "zero sum game" has a positive and a negative outcome. The positive outcome is that the environment is restored. The negative outcome is that the restoration project won't get built unless there is a "market" in negative damage and buyers willing to pay. Is that fair?
Finance
Damages from Climate Change
First world countries (the major industrialized nations) have agreed that their industrial water and air pollution are the majority causes of climate change. Third world countries, i.e., non-industrialized countries, are frequently damaged by floods, rising sea levels, desertification, and very hot weather, to name a few examples of damage from climate change. Should the first world countries reimburse third world countries for these damages? If so, how much should they pay? Should the payments be apportioned among the first world countries, or should the country with the greatest ability to pay be responsible for all the damages? This project raises scientific and financial as well as moral issues. Causation will be a key factor in your research--
Finance
The Law School Experience
Student will investigate what actually happens in law school and the legal profession. They will interview lawyers, law students, judges, paralegals, or professors.
Business
Supreme Court Case That Changed America
Student will select a Supreme Court case that significantly changed American law.
Business
Follow the Money: How Financial Crimes Are Investigated
Student will select a famous financial crime or corporate scandal and reconstruct what happened by following the money. They will examine how investigators identified suspicious transactions, what accounting techniques were used to conceal wrongdoing, and how prosecutors ultimately proved the case. Potential subjects include Enron, Bernie Madoff, Theranos, or other major financial scandals.
Business
Can Machine Learning Diagnose Disease from Biological Data? Building a Biomarker Classifier
I work at the intersection of biology and data science, building machine learning models on molecular data (e.g., blood transcriptomics) to identify biomarkers that can predict disease status or progression the same approach used in precision diagnostics research. A student on this project would learn the core workflow of applying ML to biological data: finding and cleaning a public dataset (e.g., from GEO or Kaggle) for a disease of their choosing, engineering or selecting relevant features (genes, clinical variables, imaging metrics), training and validating a classification or prediction model, and critically evaluating its performance and limitations including where AI risks overfitting or bias in clinical data. Deliverables could range from a working Python notebook/model with a written report, to a research paper evaluating an ML approach against a disease-progression or diagnostic question, to a prototype dashboard visualizing the model's predictions.
Cancer, Neuroscience
Reading the Cancer Genome: Hunting for Biomarkers in Public Tumor Datasets
I spent several years in molecular oncology research at a cancer center, and I now also work with public genomic datasets to find disease biomarkers using computational tools. A student here would learn the fundamentals of cancer genetics how tumors accumulate mutations, why some biomarkers predict outcome and others don't plus hands-on experience navigating public repositories like TCGA, GEO, or cBioPortal, and basic bioinformatics in R or Python. We'd start by choosing a cancer type and a specific question (e.g., does a certain gene's expression track with survival or treatment response?), pull real patient data, and work through exploring and interpreting it against the existing literature. Deliverables could range from a formal research paper or poster to a data visualization dashboard, a public-facing explainer article, or a short computational notebook the student can showcase.
Cancer, Neuroscience
The Availability of Clean Water
As the global population increases, demand for clean, drinkable water will also increase. Does your country have enough clean water? Why not? What could be done about it?
Finance