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
Prevalence of anxiety in a high school population
My field of expertise involves mental health, mentorship, and internal medicine and I am proficient in SPSS. Students will gain knowledge of recruiting participants, utilizing accredited surveys, collecting survey data using qualtrics and excel, analyzing the data using excel and/or SPSS, and writing a manuscript. This will include reaching out to high schools to obtain consent to spread the survey, gathering answers from high school students anonymously, and exporting it from qualtrics to excel, replacing answers with numeric symbols to compute to SPSS. The potential student outcomes may include writing a scientific research paper, creating a survey, and/or creating an oral or poster presentation.
Biology, Psychology, Arts, Languages, Chemistry
Understanding the Mechanisms Underlying Drug Abuse
Addiction is a learned behavior that comes with the repeated use of stimulants, depressants, or narcotics. These different drug classes have very different mechanisms of action and affect people in very different ways, yet they all hijack innate learning mechanisms to drive a person to seek the drug above food, water, family, school, and work. The goal of this project would be to investigate one specific drug and how it hijacks the brain with repeated use.
Biology, Psychology
Science Communication
One of the most important parts of medical/STEM studies is the ability to explain complex scientific ideas to the lay population. Physicians need to be able to explain diseases and treatments to patients. Public Health officials need to be able to explain why certain policies are necessary or why certain ideas need to be examined further. For this project: -Students will choose a topic they feel passionately about -Perform a comprehensive literature review -Create educational materials such as a PSA video, brochure, and/or presentation to describe their topic to a lay population
Biology, Cancer, Public Health
Exploring Diversity in Animal Form and Function
Goal: To analyze and compare bone shapes across different animal taxa and develop hypotheses for the significance of bone shape in relation to ecology. Comparative morphology, or the study of how form differs between groups of organisms, plays a significant role in understanding the evolution and diversity. A famous example of a comparative morphological study was Darwin's study of Galapagos Island finches, whose beak shapes diversified for their various diets. Many studies in this field focus on the shapes of bones, especially the skull or limb bones. Studies comparing animal bone shapes have traditionally been carried out in museum collections, which are typically available only to professional researchers. However, the amount of public, digital data available for the study of animal anatomy has been growing wildly in the past decade--This means that students can visualize bones from a wide variety of species from home! Here are some steps that you might use to carry out a comparative morphological study: 1) Choose a group of animals ("taxon") you are interested in and think about what unique or interesting skeletal features they have. Search existing scientific literature to find out what we know about that feature and why it might have evolved to be shaped that way. 2) Inspect bones from this taxon online and visually compare bone shapes between various species in your group of interest. 3) Think about how the different behaviors and ecologies of your animal group may influence the shape of this bone. You might think about feeding habits, sensory perception, and locomotion, for example. 4) Write your hypotheses about the function of this bone in a research paper, explaining your observations in detail. You could even create some artistic illustrations of the differences you saw! Then, ask yourself--Do your hypotheses agree with existing scientific hypotheses?
Biotech, Biology
Racial Disparities and Preferences in Breast Reconstruction
This project reviews differences and disparities in access to care, type of breast reconstruction, and health outcomes among women who have survived breast cancer. Comparisons will be made based on the patients' racial and ethnic identities. This project offers an excellent opportunity to contribute to a growing body of knowledge on health disparities in order to address an important public health question.
Biology, Neuroscience, Surgery, Healthcare, Public Health
You Are What You Eat: A Podcast on the Intersection Of Diet and Skin Health
Many have heard the phrase "you are what you eat" at some point in their lives. However, much fewer know what that means, let alone how to approach implementing meals that promote skin health and dampen signs and symptoms of disease. This podcast applies the science of nutrition and dermatology to popular diets and food myths to provide a more digestible means of eating for better skin.
Biology, Nutrition, Medicine
Algae Biofuel synthesis through genetically engineered TAG Secretion
There are many different avenues researchers have taken to produce efficient 0% or negative emission biofuel. However, the major contribution to greenhouse gas accumulation is aviation and mass ground-transportation, both of which rely on diesel rather than gasoline. Algal metabolism of triglycerides (TAG) – easily convertible to biodiesel – has been robustly bioengineered to produce copious amounts of TAG. The problem with industrial biodiesel production from algae lies in extraction of TAG from algae. The physical methods require energy intensive processes of mechanical cell lysis that make algal biodiesel production inefficient and costly, and they cannot be scaled up easily to industrial levels. Passive methods of TAG extraction from algae often kills the culture, resulting in a less “renewable” source of energy. What if we could engineer cells to excrete TAG's by themselves! Lets learn about genetic engineering and TAG secretion across species!
Biology, Cancer, Neuroscience, Computer Science
COVID 19 Vaccine
In this project, you will work to create a presentation, infographic, pamphlet, or whatever you see best to explain the COVID vaccine. Many people are afraid of the vaccine, and you are tasked with helping public health officials communicate why it is important to get the vaccine.
Biology, Nutrition, Public Health
Finding Trends in the Data
There are many publicly available databases with loads of interesting findings in them that have yet to be discovered! For this project, we will first find an interesting dataset and then come up with some awesome questions to ask. We can find correlations in the dataset to either support or refute our hypothesis. We will also make graphs to show the trends that we find in the dataset.
Biology
What makes the clock tick?
What are circadian clocks, who has them, and how do they work? We will come up with experiments to figure our how we can alter the circadian clock responses in the organisms around us.
Biology
Expression of an antimalarial peptide by plasmid transfected Yogurt bacteria I: feasibility, experimental design and measurement
The feasibility of making ‘antimalarial yogurt’ was explored. A plasmid containing the gene for the antimalarial peptide, NK2, linked to a nonapeptide expressing linker and a gene expressing a signal peptide USP45 to facilitate the export of NK2 out of the bacterial cell; an antibiotic resistance gene as well as a gene expressing the protein UL16 to render the bacterial cell resistant to the expressed NK2 was designed to be cloned into Lactobacillus delbrueckii subsp. bulgaricus and Streptococcus thermophilus; the two bacterial species present in the yogurt of choice. An inexpensive electroporation apparatus was identified for transformation of the yogurt bacteria with the plasmid. Yield calculations showed that an adult would need to ingest two 5.3 ounce servings of recombinant yogurt per day to achieve a therapeutic concentration of NK2 in blood. Expression of NK2 was demonstrated by performing preliminary hemolysis experiments using sheep blood with and without incorporation of yogurt. A literature search indicated that Plasmodium bergheii, a species that is non-infective in humans, could be cultured in vitro using sheep blood thus eliminating the need to procure and house live rodents. The school chemistry laboratory was classified as being biosafety level 1, thereby allowing material transfer agreements with vendors shipping the plasmodium parasite, plasmids and blood. This project is complete and is published in the Journal of High School Science at https://jhss.scholasticahq.com/article/9392-expression-of-an-antimalarial-peptide-by-plasmid-transfected-yogurt-bacteria-i-feasibility-experimental-design-and-measurement
Biology, Neuroscience, Chemistry
Mindfulness training in high school students improves interoceptive awareness, reduces anxiety and rumination
For this project, students would perform a combined experiment and literature review investigating the effects of mindfulness meditation on behavioral wellness. Students would be able to function as their own research subjects and track changes in their physical and mental health using an application. Students would be mentored on how to use statistical programs to analyze their data and create figures for potential publication.
Psychiatry, Biology, Neuroscience, Psychology, Chemistry
Narrative or Systematic Review
Read and process current scientific papers in a topic area of your choice. There can be a variety of outcomes, including a formal paper aimed at a science audience (such as a narrative or systematic review) or something public-facing, like a video, blog post, or podcast. The point is to distill a huge body of information and communicate it in a clear way. What are some possible topics? For example, how are whole-brain networks altered during the progression of dementia? Why is the name and function of everyday objects difficult to identify, or personal memories hard to recall? Maybe your interest is more medical and you want to review current pharmacological or behavioral treatment. Maybe your interest is more theoretical and you want to understand how concepts are represented in the mind and brain. You decide the direction!
Music, Biology, Psychology
Project 2: The Book of the Dead
Did you know that there are many ways for cells to die? Why is cell death important for health and disease? The goal of this project is for students to research the fascinating biology of cell death and create their own blog, website or 'zine about cell death. This project will teach students the basic principles of cellular and molecular biology, scientific communication, and information design. Students will gain experience creating and analyzing scientific data and visuals, and will learn how to present complex scientific ideas in an accessible manner. This project will help build skills important for future studies in both the humanities and STEM fields.
Biology, Cancer
Genetics and ethics
Genetics as a field has a fraught history rooted in the discriminatory, and ultimately extremely harmful, eugenics movement to stealing samples from Indigenous communities to study ancient DNA, to perpetuating racism through projects today that study racial differences. This is all despite that the data show that racialized groups are actually more similar between groups than any given individuals within that group are, and that the data show that racialized genetic analyses actually show huge overlaps. One way to combat this would be to compile a literature review of the research so far to show that much more of the research show that genetics data is antiracist, but the interpretations have been historically racist. Another way is through short stories, lectures, podcasts, blogs, commentaries, or other ways of getting the word out that humans are genetically very similar and the differences represented are not racial.
Biology, Ethics
Effect of Lecture-Based Intervention to Promote Resiliency (especially during COVID)
In the era of COVID, humans have had to be more resilient. This project would be to observe how a lecture or series of lectures could theoretically improve resiliency in a group of people. Resiliency has benefits in promoting mental health, increased self-esteem, and more optimistic outlook. Using surveys/tests for resiliency, Students will measure resiliency before and after the proposed intervention.
Psychiatry, Biology, Public Health
Cancer Gene Research Proposal
In this project, students will do an initial scientific literature review of some common genes that are commonly mutated in cancer. Once they find a gene of interest, will do another short scientific literature review on what is currently known about this gene in cancer development. We'll then brainstorm a few ideas about new ways we can research this gene and create a proposal. After this, we'll work towards creating a few experiments to test our proposal. Finally, we'll create a presentation of the student's choice to share their findings!
Biology, Cancer
The Development and Treatment of Cancer
Cancer is a collection of related diseases united by unregulated cell replication. Certain viruses, such as HPV, are considered oncoviruses, meaning they are cancer causing. Different types of cancer, and even different subtypes, have drastically different outcomes. For example, patients with HPV-mediated cancers are more sensitized to radiation, meaning lower doses of treatment may be equally effective as higher doses but with fewer side effects. In this project, students can pick a specific type of cancer and do a deep-dive on the mutation that causes the cancer, the treatment, and current/future therapies.
Biology, Cancer, Public Health
Photo journal
Photos of everyday objects or activities can be compiled in a virtual journal. We can explore the processes that occur within your brain as it perceives, comprehends, and emotionally connects with the world around you.
Biology, Neuroscience, Psychology
Genetic diversity and resilience in coral reefs
Coral reefs are threatened due to stressors, such as changing oceanic temperatures and ocean acidification. A large part of their ability to survive in these changing conditions is due to the amount of genetic diversity they harbor. In this project, a student can examine the genetic diversity of corals in relation to their resilience to climate-induced stressors like ocean acidification and rising sea temperatures. The student will investigate how genetic diversity contributes to coral reef health and survival by comparing coral genetic diversity in locations that are highly threatened versus those in more pristine conditions. This project will involve coding in R and bash, and can result in either a paper or presentation.
Biology
