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.

Check out some projects

Causality vs correlation - A basic tutorial on causal inference for the public

Causality is the desire of many scientific disciplines. Correlations are easier to analyze typically, but are not equivalent to causation. This is exemplified in the following phrase: "correlation does not imply causation". Causality is typically measured in medicine, policy and science via a randomized control trial, where something is randomized and then its effect on something else is measured. For example, randomizing who gets a COVID-19 vaccine and comparing people with vaccines vs without will determine the causal effect of the vaccine on preventing COVID. Modern causal inference allows one to encode causality as a graph, represented by nodes and edges in a pictorial representation. This enables scientists, policy makers and leaders to not only encode their causal assumptions for a specific problem, but also provide general algorithms for determine if someone can determine a causal effect from purely observations. A break down of graphical notions of causality in laymen terms would be useful for education at the high school and undergraduate level. Successful completion of this project could go on to inspire and educate people on causal inference. A successful project would take the basics of causal inference and break it down into a paper and/or series of short posts that introduce the topics.

Neuroscience, Economics, AI/ML

Adam

Patient Reported Motivations for Elective Cosmetic Surgery

The desire to undergo elective cosmetic surgeries is rising exponentially. Botox, fillers, sculpting, and augmentation have attracted mass media attention, dominating the entertainment landscape. Underlying the desire for these procedures are a breadth of motives: gaining an advantage at work, increasing confidence, and feeling more like one's authentic self. Elective cosmetic surgeries are a new, lucrative source of revenue for health centers, but they pose an enormous cost to patients. In this project, you will contribute to important literature which uncovers why people are willing to spend so much money on enhancing their bodies.

Public Health, Finance, Organizational Leadership, Medicine

Michael

Genome Editing: Review and Proposal

Genome editing is a rapidly developing field with enormous consequences for scientific and medical advancements. In the past few years, new techniques have emerged that have allowed for precise changes to the human genome. In this project, a student will write a review paper describing the multiple forms of genome editing and their applications. Additionally, they will propose a genome editing project that can help treat a disease of their interest - including computationally designing the appropriate tools one would need to carry out the project.

Biology, Neuroscience, Public Health

Hanan

High School Health Independence

Adolescents often have difficulty managing medical problems as they transition from pediatric to adult care. In this project, we will work together to help improve high school students' understanding of their role in maintaining a healthy lifestyle.

Biology, Ethics, Public Health, Medicine

Margaret

Exploring Cognitive Frontiers: Aerospace Neurology in the Age of Space Exploration

This title is an example of a review article written on a specific topic. Within this objective, you will write a scientific review-style paper about something that particularly interests you. The goal is for you to become proficient in finding, analyzing, and synthesizing existing research. After collecting plenty of relevant data and thoroughly familiarizing yourself with the subject matter, you will construct the review article using effective writing and editing skills. This process will teach you how to critically assess scientific literature and communicate your findings proficiently.

Biology, Neuroscience, Chemistry, Medicine

Joshua

Anxiety and Depression in High School

I have done previous work on anxiety and depression in graduate and medical students, but I am interested in how early this starts. I want to look into if there are trends we are able to pick up on now, and if there are ways to help change and better these trends.

Surgery, Medicine

Alyssa

Health literacy and COVID-19

Due to widespread information and misinformation, the importance of 'health literacy' has been emphasized during the COVID-19 pandemic. This would be an interesting topic to research.

Public Health, Medicine

Mina

Investigating the cultural inclusivity of current nutrition guidelines in medicine: a literature review

This proposed project would investigate whether current nutrition guidelines for US adults reflect cultural humility, awareness, and inclusivity and work in tandem with (rather than in opposition to) the various cultural food practices of Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) communities, highlighting the potential need for potential updates to current dietary recommendations.

Cancer, Neuroscience, Nutrition, Medicine

Micayla

Natural methods to help repair brain cell damage

Compile a list of sources of independent methods to improve recovery from neuronal injury and then create a lifestyle plan that people can use to implement all the methods. This can be applicable for people recovering from a stroke, car crash, or CTE from sports induced head injuries.

Biology, Neuroscience

Jobie

The Future of CAR-T Cell Therapies

In this project, you will learn about how novel Chimeric Antigen Receptor (CAR)-T immunotherapy is translated from laboratory research setting to clinics. Despite its strong efficacy in treating cancer, there are many challenges in commercializing and delivering the therapies to patients safely. Through extensive research of relevant literature and clinical trial data, you will write a scientific review paper about the following topics: - CAR-T structure and mechanism of actions – How does it really work? - Treatment-related toxicities of the therapies – What must be done to ensure patient safety? - Pharmaceutical development of CAR-T: Challenges in fitting CAR-T development process into conventional drug discovery and development paradigm - Limitations of CAR-T therapies in targeting solid tumor - The future of CAR-T – What innovations are required to unlock the full potential of CAR-T? Additional information: The primary goals for this project are to: (1) provide students with scientific research skills, including critical analysis of primary literature; (2) foster interdisciplinary thinking in translational science; and (3) help students to master knowledge critical to sustaining a career in pharmaceutical development.

Biology

Lananh

Child Health Policy Analysis

When new legislation is introduced, it is crucial to understand how similar policies have or have not been effective historically. A great project idea for a student interested in public health and policy would be to select a law focused on a specific public health topic (i.e. vaccine requirements, gun safety laws, mental health access). From there, the student can identify exactly what the law was meant to achieve, and then review public health/statistical databases and case reports to help determine if the enacted legislation achieved its desired effect. The student can then review the literature and propose evidence based changes to the selected policy based on this review.

Biology, Psychology, Social Science, Medicine

Kaitlin

Impact of diet on skin microbiome

Many of us are familiar with the idea of a microbiome, and much has been made of the importance of the gut microbiome, and how our diet can affect it. However, there are many other microbiomes associated with the human body, one of the most important of which is the skin microbiome. It would be interesting to study the impact of different diets, e.g. a high fat/low-carb diet, or a calorically restricted diet, or a high-carb low fat diet, on the composition of individuals' skin microbiomes over time.

Biotech, Creative Writing, Medicine

Ian

Methods to identify the region of brain stroke using different methods of MRI

Various different methods and image acquisition protocols exist for imaging the brain through MRI. This can serve as a crucial way to identify ischemia, blockage of blood flow, in the brain and causing stroke. This project involves researching multiple different types of MRI which can help aid in detecting the specific region of stroke in the brain.

Biology, Cancer, Surgery, Physics

Daniel

1. Scientific Review - Systems Neuroscience

Review the literature regarding a topic in systems neuroscience. Learn how to read and understand scientific articles, compile important findings, and predict the future state of the field.

Psychiatry, Neuroscience, Surgery, Medicine

Jianna

Strategies to reduce Incidence of Colon Cancer

Colon cancer is one of the most preventable cancers in the United States, and yet is also one of the most common. There are a number of social media education strategies that can be employed at health delivery site in communities across the country that may help reduce the alarming rate of colon cancer. Much of this has to do with increasing awareness related to dietary habits, nutrition, smoking, and other social habits. I think this would be a terrific project to take the lead on.

Medicine

Neel

Literature review in medicine

The human body normally follows the same design, but occasionally we run into anatomical variations. For instance, having a short indicis propius is common in up to 10% of patients, which can lead to negative consequences if patients require tendon transfer for another issue, or need to have hand surgery. Other anatomic variants of consequence include those of the gallbladder ducts, which can be of consequence for gallbladder surgeries. These anatomic variants can make the difference between successful and failed surgeries, so it is important to review these variants and increase awareness. Thus, a possible project is having a literature review of observed variants and their possible surgical consequences. These are relatively simpler projects that are easily publishable.

AI/ML

Christine

Mathematical Investigation of Blood Flow During Exercise

Develop a mathematical model that describes how blood flow changes in exercise. This project will teach students how to take information from physiology and medicine (vasodilation and hemodynamics) and derive from it a mathematical model that can be used to represent the system. Students will also learn how to use mathematical models to run experiments, compare experiment output with published data. Depending on the student's interest, we could also use this mathematical model to experiment how the body may change in pathological conditions such as diabetes. Potential outcomes from this project include a useable mathematical model and scientific research paper.

Biotech, Physics, Engineering, Math

Jennifer

Developing a project blueprint - putting together a specific aims page!

An essential skill in research is the design and implementation of experiments to test a scientific question. However, it can often be difficult to get started without a clear plan of action. This projects aims to develop student skills in thinking through experimental design and distilling down a large overarching scientific question into a specific plan with clear, actionable, and testable hypotheses and questions that are thoroughly addressed with a defined experimental plan. This will additionally teach skills in selecting the most appropriate research technique for a specific question and ask students to consider potential pitfalls and alternative approaches as they work through their experimental design.

Biology, Cancer

Elizabeth

Does Anyone Know How Birth Control Works?

I want to investigate the knowledge base in a high school setting of birth control in its different forms. I also want to look into how we can better inform students of birth control and general reproduction.

Surgery, Medicine

Alyssa

Explaining Dementia to My Grandmother

This project would take a true basic science approach to understanding the neuroscience fundamentals of dementia, from the molecular/cellular biology, to the circuitry involved in learning and memory, and finally culminate in translating all this scientific knowledge to the general public.

Medicine

Sage