2,893 Inspirational Passion Project Ideas
Turn inspirations into your passion project.
This collection of project ideas, shared by Polygence mentors, is meant to help inspire student thinking about their own project. Students are in the driver seat of their research and are free to use any or none of the ideas shared by their mentors.
- AI/ML
- Animation
- Arts
- Biology
- Biotech
- Business
- Cancer
- Chemistry
- Cognitive
- Computer Science
- Creative Writing
- Dance
- Dentistry
- Economics
- Engineering
- Entomology
- Environmental Science
- Ethics
- Fashion
- Finance
- Game Design
- Healthcare
- History
- Illustration
- Languages
- Linguistics
- Literature
- Math
- Medicine
- Music
- Neuroscience
- Nutrition
- Organizational Leadership
- Philanthropy
- Philosophy
- Photography
- Physics
- Psychiatry
- Psychology
- Public Health
- Quantitative
- Social
- Social Science
- Sports Analytics
- Statistics
- Surgery
Communicating scientific ideas visually: an Adobe Illustrator Workshop
Students will get an introductory tutorial on how to create and edit scientific images and will then get a chance to design their own piece of scientific art, based on an interest of their choosing. Basic familiarity with Adobe Illustrator is recommended but not required.
AI/ML, Public Health
Building a Product/Business Tracker
There are so many trackers out there - Trello, JIRA, Monday.com, etc, but they just don't quite...work for what you want for your business or startup. Together, we can identify what you want from your tracker (do you want to track business goals as well as engineering/coding goals) and build a tracking/planning platform that is bespoke to your needs!
Computer Science, Business
Science Communication Blog/Page
Communicating scientific findings to the general population, in a way that is intriguing and accurate, is a feat that many scientists are working diligently to accomplish. You can contribute to this by starting a blog about any subject of choice (i.e. a neurodegenerative disease, technical advancements in the field, use of human stem cells, etc) and accurately summarizing the key findings of nominal papers in the field. Each blog page/post will be dedicated to a specific paper where you will evaluate and write about their approach, findings, as well as what information needs more clarification. This will teach how to proficiently read primary literature and communicate to a general public audience by writing summaries.
Biology, Neuroscience
Mapping the Effects of War on Maternal and Child Health
How can we quantify the impact of war on the health of children and their mothers? In this project, the student will be learn and apply Geographic Information System (GIS) tools, Python data science skills, and large publically-avaliable datasets on global conflicts to generate an interactive in-depth map that depicts and tells the story of how war impacts maternal and child health. This project will provide the student with a deeper comprehension of how data visualization can guide decisions in foreign policy, global health, and human rights.
Computer Science, Public Health
Financial forecasting and efficient markets
Learn how financial assets (such as stocks and bonds) are priced, and how investors construct portfolios out of different assets and asset classes. Then use R or Python to analyze and visualize financial data, and to build rudimentary predictive models that attempt to forecast asset prices. Students can use these models to take a first pass at testing the so-called "efficient-market hypothesis," the idea that asset prices accurately reflect all public information and that attempting to consistently beat the market is a fool's errand.
Economics, Finance, Statistics
How does death help regeneration?
While many consider regeneration a largely proliferative event, it is often paired with waves of cell death that are vital to the process. Programmed cell death is also an important component of development in many species. However, the role of these controlled death events has not been fully elucidated, and the existing data has not been synthesized to provide a clearer picture. There are lots of unanswered questions that can be potentially explored through detailed literature reviews.
Biotech, Biology
Have you heard of this _____ animal??
Have you ever heard of the following animals: Pangolin, Naked Mole Rat, Galago, Platypus, Okapi, etc? If you love animals and want dive deeper into learning more about them exploring their unique adaptations and behavior- lets do it! This project will focus on learning more about un-common critter(s) - could be from the list above or your choice. We will look at anatomy, comparative anatomy, behavior, and functional specializations. The focus will be on how all these relate back to the brain.
Neuroscience, Cognitive
Small Off-Grid Battery Bank
How can you build a small off-grid battery bank for your next camping trip? This project would involve investigating battery supplies, management tools, and potentially a small solar bank? Size and build your own small power bank!
Engineering
Print, Polemic, and Poetry
How did the invention of the printing press coupled with the Reformation catapult different genres of religious literature into everyone's hands? Literate and nonliterate people alike spent their hard-earned cash to see some spicy takes on figures like the pope (vicar of Christ or anti-Christ?) and Martin Luther (liberator of the conscience or arch-heretic?)—why?
History
Stock Portfolio Project
In this project, my Mentees will be given a Hypothetical million dollars and will be asked to chose between 5 to 10 fortune 500 companies to invest in. Throughout the course of our ten sessions we will be monitoring and tracking the increases and decreases in the stock using NASDAQ and track the progress in an excel file. At the end, I will ask that a research paper be formulated using the findings explaining which companies are best/worst to invest in for a short period of time when both comparisons are made and historical data is taken into consideration. The end goal is to ensure that my mentees understand the value of doing research about investments before putting money into them. Also, this will help to make sure that the message of how volatile the market can be is clearly communicated.
Business, Finance
Socioeconomic barriers to pursuing higher education
Pursuing higher education is a great privilege that many students do not have the resources to pursue. Students can read papers on standardized testing and historical barriers to education and synthesize the information in an essay or creative format like a poem.
Surgery, Medicine
How does a cell manage so much information?
Cells in the human body are constantly exposed to so much information - for example, they receive messages sent by nearby cells, they monitor their own progression through the cell cycle, and they check to make sure their DNA, RNA, and proteins are maintained and produced without any mistakes. Proteins involved in "signaling networks" ferry this information throughout the cell, but there are only so many signaling proteins and networks. How does a cell encode complex messages about its status and its environment? When all the signaling proteins are mixed together in the cell cytoplasm, how does it keep all of this information organized? These are some of the questions related to cell signaling and signaling network crosstalk that would serve as excellent inspiration for a review paper focused on a specific topic of interest to you.
Cancer
Sex Differences in Alzheimer's Disease
Women are disproportionately affected by Alzheimer's Disease and make up nearly two-thirds of the patient population. The student will study various biological and lifestyle factors contributing to women's heightened risk of developing dementia and publish a comprehensive literature review.
Neuroscience
Stay out! History of Combating Infectious Diseases
Public health is constantly evolving, but what have we done previously to stop epidemics? How did different societies face different threats? In this project, students can pick an (infectious) disease they are interested in and compare ways different societies (of the same or different time period) tried to eliminate this threat. We will then work turning this question into a project! Can be video, review paper, etc.
Biology
Fear of missing out (FoMO) and its possible implications for our moral interactions
The fear of missing out (FoMO), an anxiety that others may be having rewarding experiences that you aren't taking part in, is likely something most of can relate to. Higher levels of FoMO have been found to be associated with increased social media use, texting while driving, and decreased life satisfaction. More recently, I have found that college students with higher levels of FoMO engage in more inappropriate activities (selling drugs, cheating in school, stealing) than their lower FoMO peers. This suggests there may be an effect of FoMO on moral cognition, for surely they know these things are wrong but choose to do them anyways. There is little to no current research done regarding this area of psychology so a paper discussing how FoMO may influence our moral cognition and resulting behaviors would be an incredibly interesting and meaningful contribution to the field!
Social, Cognitive
Social Media and Adolescent Mental Health: A Comprehensive Study
This research project aims to investigate the impact of social media usage on the mental health of adolescents. The objective is to explore the correlation between social media habits, such as usage patterns, content consumption, and interaction frequency, and mental health parameters, including stress, anxiety, self-esteem, and overall well-being. Through this study, the student seeks to shed light on the complex relationship between social media and mental health in young individuals.
Healthcare
The Physician-Patient Relationship and How It Relates to Long Term Patient Outcomes.
If you went to the doctor when you were younger I am sure you remember whether the experience was enjoyable or miserable. We continue to have these experiences as we grow older. There have been many articles that have pointed out that patients that have good rapport and or a good relationship with their healthcare provider tend to have better health outcomes. It would be interesting to see how the life span, number of hospital admissions, and overall quality of life compares between patients that enjoy their health care provider and those who do not.
Biology, Chemistry, Math, Medicine
Cancer research
You can pick a topic of your interest (e.g. certain type of cancer) and write a review article on the physiology, recent advances (e.g. immune therapy, nanoparticles for drug delivery etc) in treating this cancer.
Cancer, Engineering
Artistic Medium Exploration
In this project, there are two major options: 1. Choose an artistic medium to learn or practice it by producing an array of pieces in a series. 2. Choose a topic and create an array of pieces using a different artistic medium for each. This project would be more open-ended and a good chance to explore something creative you may not have tried before.
Biology, Arts, Photography, Chemistry, Math
Synergistic Pain Management for Postoperative Pain
This project will include a brief overview of current postoperative pain management guidelines, the neurobiology of opioid pain relief, and the burden of opioid addiction faced by patients undergoing surgery. The bulk of the project consists of a thorough literature review of pain relief pathways in the brain and research exploring synergistic ways of relieving postoperative pain via neurobiology (such as complimentary receptor stimulation) that may decrease the narcotic requirement for adequate pain relief of postsurgical patients in the future. The literature review will then conclude in information synthesis and a scientific manuscript summarizing the current state of research on pain pathways. The findings are relevant to important topics in addressing the opioid epidemic.
Biology, Neuroscience, Surgery, Healthcare, Public Health
