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
An Original Research Project
One of my favorite things to do is to creating research studies. Do you have an aching question about how humans behave that you would want to further explore? If so, what's the best way to do it? I'm here to help coach you through your own, original research project. Together, we could pursue your question using online surveys, in-person experiments, or observing how people interact with their environment. Once your data is collected, I can help you analyze your findings, craft a narrative of what you discovered, and publish the work online. Happy to work together to pursue something you are passionate about!
Music, Neuroscience, Social, Psychology, Statistics
Diving into Data Science using Health Data
My background is in health sciences, public health, and data science. This project applies basic data management, cleaning, and analysis techniques to public health and organizational data. The student will be able to develop a data management plan, data dictionary, and slide deck to report on what they learned about data science as well as answer specific research questions related to health care, public health, or the health sciences.
Public Health, Statistics
Improving Efficiency in Manufacturing by Minimizing Waste
Waste is detrimental to any process and ubiquitous in manufacturing. Lean principles like eliminating wasted movement, 5S (sort, straighten shine, standardize, and sustain), value stream mapping, and work-cell design can reduce waste. Each of these principles can also be applied to every day tasks such as cooking a meal in your kitchen. Statistical tools help to determine if changes to processes have been successful. Six Sigma provides a standard set of statistical analysis that can measure if a significant change has been made. Once again, these tools are not limited to manufacturing but could be applied in a variety of projects.
Philanthropy, Business, Statistics
A bayesian basketball win prediction system
Bayes rule is crucial to modern statistics (as well as data science, machine learning). Using some results from Bayesian statistics one can model the distribution of basketball performance stat distributions. Using a bayesian model to predict the probability distribution of these statistics we can attempt to predict a teams win and loss rate versus another team by drawing samples from these distributions and computing correlation to win or loss. Project can be as simple or as complicated as the student would like, simple normal models, mixture models, Gibbs sampling, and hidden Markov models can all be featured, based on students interest and comfort. Student will spend some time 1) learning about bayes rule, and learning about some famous probability distributions 2) learning how to code a fairly simple simulation in R or python (choice is yours) 3)Learning how to interpret the significance of statistical results and adjust results over time based on success/failure of model over time.
Math, AI/ML, Statistics
The Study
Do you have the perfect research questions and a clear sense of how you want to go about answering them? Then let's do the study together! By conducting a psychology study, you'll put together a research plan, carry it out over a period of time, and learn how to synthesize the data. Together, we'll put your research skills to test, discuss extensively the ethics of psychology research, and take data-analysis step-by-step. At the end of this project, you'll have completed a research study, and earn the life-long bragging rights among family and friends!
Social, Psychology, Social Science, Statistics
How is human behavior shaped by societal factors?
How do societal factors - from culture and class, to economic inequality and political polarization - shape human behavior? In this project, you will pick one societal factor you are interested in and do a "deep dive" into how it shapes psychological processing and how people interact with one another. Together, we can explore a range of questions that most interest you, from how do romantic relationships differ across culture or class, to how does economic inequality influence perceptions of trust and competition? This project can either be a scientific review paper or the product of a secondary analysis of data from publicly available sources.
Social, Psychology, Statistics
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
ADORE: impAct of coviD On feRtility carE
The purpose of this study is to examine the experiences of women and their partner seeking reproductive endocrinology and infertility care during the COVID-19 outbreak.
Ethics, Social Science, Public Health, Statistics
Design a Clinical Psychology and/or Public Health Research Study
Do you have a research question related to mental or physical health issues? Have you wondered what factors put people at risk or protect people from these conditions? Interested in what interventions or policies can help prevent or treat these conditions and how to adapt them for different populations or contexts? Are you stuck on where to begin? I will help you put your interests in the context of existing research and develop your own literature review, study, or set of policy recommendations or guidelines. Studies can be quantitative or qualitative and with data you collect or that is publicly available.
Psychiatry, Public Health, Statistics
COVID-19 and Global Financial Crisis
It is shocking how the economic effects of COVID-19 are far outweighting the ones from the Global Financial Crisis 2007-08. How much is the difference in terms of employment? Production? Let's go to the data!
Economics, Math, Finance, Statistics
Who's Allowed to be a Citizen?: The History of Exclusionary Immigration Laws in the U.S.
This project examines the history of immigration laws in the U.S. and how these laws have excluded different groups overtime. How have these laws decided who's allowed to enter the country and become a citizen? What are the reasonings for these laws?
Quantitative, Social Science, Statistics
Developing a new method of measuring multiraciality
Have you ever wondered what happens to data collected from participants who check the box "Multi-racial" when asked about their race or ethnicity? In most cases, those data points are discarded, because we currently lack a reliable and effective method of analyzing racial-ethnic differences among multiracial individuals. This project proposes a new statistical analysis method that potentially allows us to find unique and groundbreaking insights into the collection and measurement of multiracial data.
Psychology, Business, Statistics, Organizational Leadership
Healthcare Research Project with Statistics and Data
We will first examine the broad and diverse definitions of "health". Subsequently, we will explore decision making with respect to health from economic, critical, and social theories; who should be responsible for financing the provision of healthcare; and what tradeoffs exists among different modes of healthcare financing systems. At this stage, the project is more philosophical and theoretical in which I want the student to wrestle with these topics and come to their own opinion about health and the financing and provision of healthcare with me as guide they can lean on for assistance and facilitation of critical problem solving. Once the student understands theoretical frameworks as they relate to these topics, I would like to introduce different methods and statistical analyses used to understand the relationship between predictor variables and health outcome variables. I will go over basic research methodology, biostatics, and coding. In the third stage of the project, the student will come up with a research question and hypothesis and we will use a publicly available health data set to test that hypothesis.
Economics, Healthcare, Business, Statistics
Measuring the impact of online reviews on customer satisfaction and loyalty for a hotel booking platform.
This project aims to design and conduct a survey to measure how online reviews influence customer satisfaction and loyalty for a hotel booking platform. The project will use a mixed-methods approach, combining quantitative and qualitative data from online surveys, interviews, and focus groups. The project will also analyze the relationship between online reviews, customer satisfaction, loyalty, and behavioral outcomes, such as repeat purchases, referrals, and complaints. The project will require skills in survey design, data collection, data analysis, and report writing. The project will be relevant for students who are interested in marketing, consumer behavior, or hospitality management.
Economics, Math, Business, Statistics
Create a machine learning model
Use statistics and machine learning to build a model that can estimate predict, or compute something you are interested in. It could be a model that detects your favorite animal in a picture or one that identifies when someone is dancing in your favorite style. Identify something that you want to build and this would be a great way to practice coding and using statistical methods.
Physics, AI/ML, Statistics
Ancient Analogs for Natural Disasters
To best project how natural hazards will change in the future, it is critical to understand how they have behaved under historical climates. Prior to the relatively recent invention of satellites and recording equipment, however, we rely on historical observations that only exist for less than 200 years. Geological analogs can provide new information about hazards presence and severity and can even span several millennia. Yet, their implementation to broader natural hazard modeling and projections has been limited. In this project, the student would conduct a detailed literature review on datasets and methodologies for using such analogs for hazards like hurricanes, flooding, heat, etc. Based on the student's findings, they will create a central database and review paper for available data sources/analogs and their potential impact for different natural hazards.
Engineering, Statistics
Simulate motion
Create musculoskeletal model and use it in a physics based platform to simulate a motion you care about. You might think about simulating your favorite sport to see if you can learn about the forces involved, or perhaps you've always wondered how cats seem to land on their feet.
Physics, AI/ML, Statistics
Is this "statistically significant" ?
This project will teach some introduction statistics concepts (what does "statistically significant" REALLY mean? what does it NOT mean?). We will work with a publicly available dataset to understand and apply concepts of data analysis and hypothesis testing.
Math, AI/ML, Statistics
Basketball Statistics Reporting Website.
Not interested in predictive modeling? cleaningtheglass.com is a great example of the the usefulness of a clean and important reporting tool. This project will be more heavily focused on the data engineering and gathering and front end visualization.
Sports Analytics, Statistics
Player Projection Model
538's RAPTOR and basketball index's PIPM are just two examples of predictive models that take in a players past and current performance to predict out how they will be in the coming years. Similar to the draft model, understanding which player's are on the verge of improving and which have the potential to decline is important for NBA front offices. This project will include data gathering and cleaning, predictive modeling with the potential to create an app based visualization to show results.
Sports Analytics, Statistics