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Browse project ideas by Polygence mentors
Project Idea: How Does Culture Shape Consumer Behavior? A Study of Brand Preferences Across Generations
Why do some brands become part of our identity, while others are simply products we buy? In this project, you will investigate how cultural background, family traditions, and generational differences influence consumer preferences. You might explore how food brands adapt to different cultural markets, why younger and older consumers respond differently to advertising, or how people living between cultures develop brand loyalties. You will begin by reviewing research on consumer psychology, cultural identity, and marketing. Then, you will develop a focused research question and collect data through a small survey, interviews, or publicly available market research. By analyzing your findings, you will identify patterns in how cultural experiences shape purchasing decisions and consider what these insights reveal about consumer behavior. Your final project could be a research paper or presentation that connects your findings to broader questions in economics, psychology, and business. This project is ideal for students interested in understanding the human behavior behind everyday decisions and how research can help explain real-world trends.
Economics, Business, Social Science
Does Your Tumor’s Genetic Mutation Change Your Odds of Survival? Analyzing Real Cancer Patient Data
Doctors increasingly choose treatments based on a tumor’s genetic mutations, not just where the cancer started. In this project, you’ll test that idea yourself using real, de-identified data from thousands of cancer patients in public databases like cBioPortal and The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). The question you’ll answer: Pick one cancer (breast, lung, colon, or brain) and one gene (for example TP53, KRAS, or BRCA1). Do patients whose tumors carry a mutation in that gene survive longer or shorter than patients whose tumors don’t? What you’ll actually do: Learn the basics of how cancer mutations work and how clinical trial data is organized. Choose your cancer type and gene. Pull real patient data and split patients into “mutated” vs. “not mutated” groups. No coding experience needed to start, since cBioPortal has a point-and-click interface. Build survival curves (Kaplan-Meier plots), the same graphs used in published clinical trials. If you want a challenge, I’ll teach you to recreate them in Python. Interpret your results like a clinician. What do they suggest for patient care, and what are the limitations? You’ll learn to read the survival graphs and statistics that appear in every medical journal, and you’ll work with real patient data instead of just reading about it. What you’ll finish with: A short research paper with your own original figures, plus the option to submit it to a high school science journal.
Neuroscience, Cancer
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
