The IJAS State Expo was held at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale this year. IMSA had six of the seven students who completed at Regionals qualify for this annual state competition. Entries included one paper and four posters/projects; three of which were recognized with awards.
STUDENT PROJECTS
Edward Ning and Sindhu Chalasani’s project, Role of Matrix Metalloproteinase Inhibitors on CMT-93 Wound Healing, also received the EPIC Award in Cellular and Molecular Biology. Their project created varying concentrations of inhibitors to these proteins to see the effect on wound healing success and how the morphology of these wounds changed over timed intervals.
Maitrevi Pandey’s project, Amyloid-B Oligomer Formations Over Time, also received a Gold Award for her work, which enabled her to learn more about how the Aß protein changes from a non-toxic monomer to a neurotoxic oligomer when looking at the progression of Alzheimer’s disease.
Rising junior Ryan Cho presented a Novel Multidomain Machine Learning Monitoring system project on the Brian for Assistive Learning and was also recognized with the EPIC Award in Engineering. Ryan’s research focused on creating a brain-computer interface that could identify cognitive states using EEG sensors.
Other state qualifiers from IMSA who could not attend included Ryan Li and Anirudh Chari, with projects in computer science. Anirudh Chari’s paper, Space-Time Conflict Spheres for Constrained Multi-Agent Motion Planning, proposed a space-time conflict resolution approach for MAMP by formulating the problem using a novel, flexible sphere-based discretization for trajectories and composed procedures for evading discretization error and adhering to kinematic constraints in generated solutions. Ryan Li’s project, Presence of lnfluence Operations in Xinjiang, analyzed patterns in public Twitter datasets using natural language processing libraries and determined the existence of influence operations and their relation to the current narrative of Uyghur oppression in Xinjiang.
