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
The role of glycans in human health and disease
Glycans (sugars) are one of the main building blocks of life, along with proteins, nucleic acids, and lipids. But, compared to the other classes, glycans have been incredibly understudied. Where as proteins and DNA have advanced methods for sequencing and visualization, numerous limitations still persist with studying sugars. This project will give students the opportunity to learn about the incredible role of these complex molecules in human health and disease. Along with learning about their importance students can learn the different methods for studying glycans and how crucial they are for the proper function of drugs.
Biology, Neuroscience, Chemistry
Review paper on recent developments in neuropsychiatric therapeutics
Student will investigate the advances in neurospsychiatric behavioral therapeutics, including preclinical animal research and clinical findings in humans. Some topics may include deep brain stimulation, transcranial magnetic stimulation, and neuropharmacological approaches.
Psychiatry, Neuroscience
Network Modeling
In this project, students will learn about different types of neural networks and what problems motivated their creation from a historical perspective. Students will then select a network model to train to perform a task using a publicly available dataset. For example, students could train a convolutional neural network to categorize images in the CIFAR-10 dataset. Depending on familiarity with python, students will have the option of building their own model or using a publicly available one.
Biology, Neuroscience, Computer Science, Math
How does aberrant sensory reactivity change our behavior?
Our senses are so powerful, and they can change the way we navigate through the world. When senses are hyper or hyposensitive, how does this affect us? Students may select a specific sensory pathway they are interested in and examine how it is disrupted in a number of conditions, such as neurodevelopmental disorders.
Neuroscience, Public Health
An Analysis on Why the Legal Drinking Age is 21 Years Old
An American adult can basically do anything he or she wishes at 18 years old. He or she can vote in elections, purchase a gun in some states, even get a mortgage - but an 18 year old is unable to legally consume alcohol. Why is that, and how did this nationwide disparity in legal age come to be? This project examines the laws and cultural shifts in America and how they led to having the drinking age not be 18 years old, but instead 21.
Neuroscience, Psychology, Social Science
Mini-Design Health: Biomedical/Health Engineering Focus
Conduct a needs finding session where you identify a need in a medical/biomedical/biological context. Talk to experts that may have expertise and input (ex. clinicians, engineers). Come up with a needs statement. Come up with a prototype based on findings from market analysis, opportunity matrix, and more. Deliverable: report on needs finding, expert interviews, needs statement development, solution development and steps, prototype methods
Neuroscience, Engineering
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
Podcast Series: Racism in Medicine
The medical field is not immune from racism. From deliberate experimentation on enslaved peoples to withholding proper treatment to Black Men in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, racism has been present since the start of the medical profession in the United States. In this project, a student will research and interview professionals on different examples of racism in medicine. Each podcast episode will revolve around a specific example - with background information given by the student and a featured interview with a professional.
Biology, Neuroscience, Public Health
Neurophysiological mechanisms of autism spectrum disorder or epilepsy
The complexity of the brain poses challenges to our understanding of autism spectrum disorder (and epilepsy), a neurodevelopmental disorder. From genetic modifications to intrinsic neuronal properties, critical aspects of neuronal circuitry are often altered in these two diseases. This project would delve into the breadth of literature on the topic, especially looking at potential therapies for neurodivergent populations. For example, a recent paper came out with evidence for Cannabidiol (CBD) as a therapy/treatment for mitigating seizures of epilepsy models.
Biology, Neuroscience
How the state of the brain impacts neural processing and behavior
Let's imagine two scenarios. Scenario 1: you are sitting in the back of a classroom and the room is warm and cozy. As the teacher/professor is explaining a boring topic, your attention drifts in and out and you process little of what is being discussed. Scenario 2: Your crush is standing 10 feet away from you and whispering something to a friend. Their conversation is very faint but you process and remember every little detail that you can overhear. These are two different scenarios where your brain is in completely distinct internal attention/arousal states. These differences in brain states, which can be internally driven (sleepy or alert, sad or happy) or external (engaging in physical activity versus sitting on the couch), impact all aspects of neural processing from responsiveness to sensory stimuli to processing of the meaning of the stimuli to decision making. On a daily basis, our internal and external states fluctuate all the time and are, unknown to us, impacting all aspects of our lives. Interestingly, neural chemicals in the brain such as dopamine, acetylcholine, and norepinephrine play a big role in the state dependent modulation of brain activity. We can explore the role of these arousal states on neural processing and behavior by writing a review paper or hosting a series of podcasts or creating blogs on the topic. We can also do some fun at-home experiments on ourselves or family and friends, such as whether running or other physical exercise improves sensory perception or memory! Or maybe there is an activity that makes you happy and boosts your dopamine levels, like eating chocolate or shopping or playing video games, do those activities improve your sensory perception and performance?
Neuroscience, Cognitive
How does the brain process information in health and disease?
Information is stored in the brain from the level of single synapses to multiple brain areas. How this is achieved has been an active area of research for decades. Project ideas: 1) How does learning occur in the brain? From the level of electrical activity to molecular events, what is the contemporary explanation of how the brain learns in health and disease? We know many medical conditions are related to learning and memory deficits (Alzheimer's disease), but the mechanisms underlying these impairments are still relatively unknown. In this project we can explore normal processes in the brain (movement, learning, emotions, etc.) and how they are disrupted in clinical conditions.
Biotech, Neuroscience, AI/ML
Correctional Officers’ Potential Empathy Deficiency: Its Regressive Contributions to Racial Adversities in the U.S. Prison System
This study could challenge the ubiquitous pattern of race and ethnicity implicated in the maltreatment towards Black criminals. The goal for the study would be to empirically assess how empathy changes in relation to social groups-- like race-- and how their maltreatment is a major contributor to fatal psychological disorders in the U.S. prisons.
Neuroscience, Social, Psychology, Social Science, Cognitive
Analyzing and Understanding Moisture Detection
Human tactile senses are rich and dynamic. By combining information about changes in temperature, chemical environment, and vibration and indentation stimuli, we can construct highly detailed and precise neural representations of objects. Our sense of discriminative touch is based in neurological responses to vibration and indentation stimuli. In our skin we have a wide array of different fiber types, each tuned to a specific stimulus type and intensity, that mediate our sense of touch. While many insects have hygroreceptors that allow them to perceive changes in humidity and moisture in their environment, without these receptors, humans are left to use cognitive processing to discern changes in moisture and wet from dry. Moisture requires sensory integration in the central nervous system and is an emergent sensation that occurs from the integration of inputs rather than a direct signal from the periphery (i.e. touch or heat). Moisture detection proves essential for sensing the world: texture discrimination, object grasping, or gait changes on slippery surfaces. The aim of this project is to understand the way our bodies interact with the physical world through touch. We will learn of the basics of neuroscience and a foundational understanding of our sense of touch. We will investigate how different neurons respond to different stimuli, how this code is transduced, and what properties of physics make this possible. Following this, we will work through the scientific method, analytic statistics, and experimental design. From there, you will write your own project proposal and emulate a laboratory to conduct home experiments to build a qualitative and quantitative understanding of how we detect varying moisture levels.
Neuroscience
Identifying Cellular Phenotypes Using CellProfiler
In this project, we will learn to process and analyze images from human brain tissue with fluorescent labeling of different cell type markers from different sets of patients that I have generated in my lab. You will learn to use the CellProfiler software to identify different cell types and capture various features (e.g. size, morphology, expression of different proteins). Next, you will compare these features across different datasets (e.g. control/healthy or male/female patients) to identify phenotypic differences. This project will provide you with valuable skills in image analysis and offer the opportunity to identify specific phenotypes in different patient populations.
Biology, Neuroscience
Exploring the Mind/Brain Connection
One of the biggest questions in neuroscience is: How do the billions and billions of cells in our brain give rise to our sensations, thoughts, memories, emotions, behaviors, and all of the amazing things that make us who we are? There are many ways of thinking about this question--and many directions we could go with this project. The brain can be studied on multiple levels: on the level of single molecules, individual cells, groups of cells (neural circuits), entire brain regions, and everywhere in between! We could take a more biological approach, maybe where we explore the neural basis of the 5 senses (sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell), or even a philosophical approach, where we read about and construct theories on consciousness (Are we all living in a simulation? If someone gets a brain transplant, are they really still "themselves"?). The possibilities here are endless!
Neuroscience, Cognitive
Psychiatry of neurodegenerative diseases
The brain enables us to maintain a stable sense of self, to create understandings of the world and others around us, and to plan for the future. Thus, unsurprisingly, many neurodegenerative illnesses result in greatly disabling psychiatric disturbances. How can we relate these changes to our understanding of “normal” brain function? Are there meaningful insights to be gleaned from comparing neuropsychiatric disorders in those with documented degenerative illnesses to those among individuals in the general population? This is a highly open-ended topic that could be viewed through a number of different lenses.
Psychiatry, Neuroscience
Science communication
There's a lot of cool technology being created out there and it's important to accurately write about these technologies for the public. Let's try our hand at science communication and write articles about up and coming neuroscience/neuro-engineering tech!
Biology, Neuroscience
Neurotechnology design features' impact on the identity and function of reactive astrocytes
I work with these brain computer inteface devices called microelectrode arrays. They communicate with neurons in the brain and allow for tetraplegic patients to regain some level or movement once again. The problem is after a few years, these arrays stop working. The reason why is that these other specialized brain cells, called astrocytes, act like body guards towards the neurons. They see these little devices and try to cover them up to protect the neurons. The problem is after awhile, the astrocytes behavior changes and they actually end up killing neurons. My job is to figure out what makes these astrocytes harmful and if I can reverse that process.
Biology, Neuroscience
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
Perceptions of cannabis use during the pregnancy period
Often people assume substance use is a easy choice, that people have not thought about the effects on them or their families. In recent literature, we have found the opposite. People often really weigh the decision of using cannabis during pregnancy quite heavily and chose to use for personal reasons. This project would explore those reasons for use depending on legalization, and access to other treatment.
Neuroscience, Psychology, Statistics
