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Browse project ideas by Polygence mentors
The Green Chemistry Challenge: Can We Make Industrial Processes Cleaner?
Field of expertise: Explore chemical engineering principles for reducing the environmental footprint of industrial chemical production. Investigate how reaction conditions, catalysts, solvents, and separation processes influence energy consumption, material efficiency, waste generation, and production costs. Knowledge and skills students will learn: Fundamentals of reaction engineering, chemical thermodynamics, and mass and energy balances. Green chemistry metrics, including atom economy, reaction yield, and waste generation. Process comparison, quantitative modeling, and scientific literature analysis. Information-gathering process: Students will select an industrial chemical process, such as ammonia production, hydrogen generation, or plastic manufacturing. They will review published research and industrial data, quantify material and energy inputs where possible, and compare conventional processes with greener alternatives. Potential student outcomes: A scientific research paper, process-flow diagram, mass-and-energy-balance model, or conceptual redesign of an industrial chemical process.
Chemistry
Powering the AI Boom : Can Renewable Energy Keep Up with Data Centers?
Field of expertise: Explore the intersection of renewable energy, data center infrastructure, artificial intelligence, and electricity-grid sustainability. Investigate how growing computational demands affect electricity consumption, carbon emissions, and the feasibility of powering data centers with solar, wind, and other low-carbon energy sources. Knowledge and skills students will learn: Fundamentals of electricity generation, renewable energy, and grid operations. How data centers consume electricity and how to interpret power demand, energy use, and carbon emissions. Data analysis, scientific literature review, and evidence-based reasoning. Information-gathering process: Students will gather public data on data center electricity consumption, AI growth, renewable energy generation, and grid emissions. They will compare electricity demand with renewable generation trends, investigate regional differences, and evaluate whether existing and planned clean-energy capacity can meet projected demand. Potential student outcomes A scientific research paper or data visualization, evaluating whether renewable energy can sustainably support the expansion of AI and data centers.
Chemistry
New Ions, New Horizons: Exploring Beyond-Lithium Alkali-Ion Chemistry
Field of expertise: Explore electrochemistry, battery materials, and alternatives to lithium-ion technology, including sodium-, potassium-, and other alkali-ion systems. Investigate why different ions behave differently in battery electrodes and what trade-offs they introduce in energy density, cost, safety, and resource availability. Knowledge and skills students will learn: Fundamentals of electrochemistry and rechargeable batteries. Periodic trends and how ionic size, charge, and chemical properties influence battery performance.Scientific literature review, data interpretation, critical thinking, and technical communication. Information-gathering process: Students will review scientific papers, research articles, and battery performance datasets. They will compare different alkali-ion chemistries, identify promising electrode materials, and evaluate reported performance metrics and practical limitations. Potential student outcomes: A scientific research paper or comparative battery-performance report proposing promising directions for beyond-lithium energy storage.
Chemistry
Researching the Political State of a Country
Students will do a deep dive into at least one foreign country of their choice and make an argument regarding current issues that are occurring there. Students may also compare the state of multiple countries to each other and present an opinion on the topic.
History, Literature
Environmental Advocacy
Students will create a deliverable (research paper, website, article, etc.) that advocates for some aspect of sustainability they find most interesting. This project will focus on students' argumentative skills, specifically learning how to advocate for or against a topic.
History, Literature
How does sleep affect brain network development in adolescents?
Sleep is essential for brain development, but the mechanisms linking sleep to changes in brain network organization remain incompletely understood. This project would investigate whether differences in sleep quality and duration are associated with changes in functional connectivity between brain regions involved in attention, memory, and emotional regulation. Students could collect sleep data using wearable devices and questionnaires and analyze existing or newly acquired functional neuroimaging data. The project could examine whether measures of sleep are associated with differences in connectivity within and between specific brain networks, and whether these relationships change over time. Depending on the student’s interests and experience, the project could involve data analysis, neuroimaging, programming, or experimental design. The goal would be for the student to develop a focused research question within the broader topic and learn how to move from a neuroscience question to a testable hypothesis and analysis.
Surgery, Neuroscience, Medicine
Louisiana and the Uniform Heir's Property Act (UHPA)
This project is a law review article that challenges the heir's property laws in the state of Louisiana and evaluates how the adoption of the Uniform Heir's Property Act is a crucial step in environmental and racial justice in Louisiana. In the face of systematic dispossession of agricultural land from African Americans in the United States (over 90% of land since 194), Louisiana has an urgent need to protect current land and homeowners from losing their land to private developers and the damaging effects of climate change. The adoption of the UHPA will not only protect families and communities from cultural and agricultural losses, but also build climate disaster resilience on our shrinking coastlines.
Dance
Small Scale, Big Impact: How Is Nanotechnology Transforming Medicine and Materials Science?
Why can a material behave differently when its size is reduced to the nanoscale? In this project, you will explore how changes in particle size, surface-area-to-volume ratio, atomic structure, and quantum effects can alter a material’s optical, electrical, mechanical, thermal, chemical, or biological properties. You will examine how scientists use these nanoscale changes to improve material performance and develop more efficient technologies in medicine, energy, electronics, environmental science, and advanced manufacturing. Based on your interests, you may focus on an emerging area such as targeted drug delivery, cancer diagnosis, antimicrobial coatings, wearable biosensors, tissue engineering, nanocomposites, water purification, energy-storage materials, quantum dots, two-dimensional materials, or nanocatalysts. You will investigate the scientific potential of the selected technology while critically examining challenges involving toxicity, stability, scalability, cost, environmental impact, and ethical use. Through this project, you will learn to find and evaluate scientific literature, connect nanoscale structure with material properties and performance, identify unanswered research questions, and communicate your conclusions through a scientific review paper, presentation, poster, or educational podcast.
Physics
Can Materials Keep Up With AI? Exploring the Future of Memory and Computing Hardware
Artificial intelligence can process enormous amounts of data, but its growing computational demands require faster, more energy-efficient hardware and memory systems. In this project, you will explore how AI is changing hardware requirements and why materials science is essential to meeting these challenges. You may investigate conventional silicon-based devices, high-bandwidth memory, memristors, phase-change memory, magnetic memory, neuromorphic computing, or emerging two-dimensional materials. You can compare these technologies based on processing speed, memory capacity, energy consumption, heat generation, durability, scalability, and cost. Through this project, you will learn how to find and critically evaluate scientific literature, understand the relationship between material properties and device performance, identify the limitations of existing technologies, and examine which emerging materials may support the next generation of AI hardware. Your final outcome could be a scientific review paper, presentation, research poster, or educational podcast.
Physics
Quantum Dots: How Can Tiny Crystals Transform Displays, Medicine, and Solar Energy?
How can crystals only a few nanometers in size produce vivid colors and support technologies ranging from television displays to medical imaging and solar cells? In this project, you will explore the unique optical and electronic properties of quantum dots and examine how their size, composition, and surface structure influence their behavior. You may focus on an application that interests you, such as QLED displays, biological imaging, cancer detection, solar-energy conversion, light-emitting devices, or quantum sensing. You can also compare traditional cadmium-based quantum dots with emerging, less-toxic alternatives such as carbon, perovskite, or indium-based quantum dots. Through this project, you will learn to find and critically evaluate scientific literature, compare materials based on performance, stability, toxicity, cost, and sustainability, and communicate your findings through a scientific review paper, presentation, poster, or educational podcast.
Physics