Research Papers

About the scholar: Lutfi Eren Erdogan grew up in Turkey and attended Uskudar American Academy in Istanbul, Turkey.

The Research:

Using advanced computer technology to classify medical images has proven challenging because the datasets of images are limited in size and mostly lack annotations, whereas the supervised convolutional neural networks that can aid diagnosis generally require large datasets annotated by experts to guarantee high performance. Pioneer scholar Lutfi thought a semi-supervised neural network might be used to train a powerful classifier that could provide accurate results. His semi-supervised classification approach worked well with medical datasets with limited images and few labels, outperforming a state-of-the-art classification network. Lutfi has made his code available for public use as part of his paper.

About the scholar: Abhishek Don Hemlani grew up in China and attended BASIS International School Guangzhou in Guangzhou, China.

The Research:

A massive explosion in the port of Beirut on August 4, 2020, killed 200 people and left 300,000 homeless. Pioneer scholar Abishek sees this disaster as the result of chronic negligence and corruption in the Lebanese government. He analyzes Lebanon’s current political, social, geopolitical, and economic risks with the goal of identifying critical areas that the IMF should address as it negotiates economic assistance and an action plan for the country. “Successful reform and recovery cannot occur without reforming the sectarian political system and changing attitudes,” he concludes, acknowledging that such systemic change is probably “out of the IMF’s domain.”

About the scholar: Jiaying Liu grew up in China and attended Indian Springs School in Birmingham, Alabama, USA.

The Research:

Plastic in the ocean is one of the greatest concerns in today’s world. Among its lesser known damaging effects is its role in transporting invasive species. Pioneer scholar Jiaying was curious about how different countries manage the dangers of coastal plastic debris. Through analyzing reports from Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii and California, she found that there was no consistent methodology for assessing the biological risk or reporting the results of mitigation efforts. She also found that public participation in clean-up efforts, and in particular educating the public to recognize biological invasion vectors and help collect data, is an underused resource.

About the scholar: Chuhan Zhang grew up in China and attended Nanjing Jinling High School International Department in Nanjing, China.

The Research:

Motivated by a transition in the image of the wolf in Chinese media “from a despicable villain to an object of worship,” Pioneer scholar Chuhan decided to research the actual relationship between wolves and humans in Tibet. She examined the figure of “wolf” in ancient and modern Chinese literature, then interviewed Tibetan pastoralists whose herds are subject to wolf predation. She found that Buddhists, who believe in the equality of all life, in general have a “live and let live” attitude, while Tibetan pastoralists, who no longer have access to guns, find the conflict with wolves a constant concern.

About the scholar: Bangjun Yue grew up in China and attended Institut Le Rosey in Rolle, Switzerland.

The Research:

Pioneer scholar Bangjun begins her paper with a hypothetical case of the use of growth hormones on two boys, one short because of a genetic defect, the other short because of inherited genes. She uses this case to examine positive eugenics (species enhancement) and negative eugenics (disease elimination). She raises several moral and ethical questions stemming from the possibility of gene manipulation in human beings: unintended consequences, lack of responsibility, interference with natural processes, impact on the long-term development of the species. Bangjun concludes that these questions should be addressed seriously by the human community before eugenics is widely used.

About the scholar: Zhanhao Zhang grew up in China and attended Shen Wai International School in Shenzhen, China.

The Research:

The idea that “entrepreneurial activities and the introduction of new means for production stimulate economic growth” has strongly influenced the business world for several decades. However, scholars have questioned this premise, and research has not revealed a strong correlation between innovation and economic growth. Pioneer scholar Zhanhao tested the theory further by using tools of quantitative analysis. He found only weak links between entrepreneurship and innovation and the economy of the United States in the years 2011-2018. He suggests that further research to yield more compelling results would include a greater date range and materials from other countries.

About the scholar: Thalia Ou grew up in China and attended Branksome Hall in Toronto, Canada

The Research:

In China, where individuals choose where to receive their healthcare, higher level hospitals are overwhelmed and lower level hospitals underutilized. Pioneer scholar Thalia points out that this disparity is caused by “information asymmetry” rather than quality of care. The more famous hospitals attract more patients and become more famous; the less well known local hospitals, which provide greater patient satisfaction, remain relatively unknown. Because her research showed one source of the problem is the online registration platforms that inform prospective patients about available services and quality of care, Thalia suggests the government expand and update them to be more comprehensive.

About the Scholar: Yixuan Zhao grew up in China and attended Shenzhen College of International Education in Shenzhen, China

The Research:

Peripheral artery disease (PAD) is a widespread disease that is commonly signaled by a buildup of plaque in the femoral artery. This plaque can cause ruptures that lead to strokes and even death. Although plaque in other arteries has been studied extensively, little attention has been paid to the femoral artery. Pioneer scholar Yixuan used the diagnostic possibilities of computational fluid dynamics to design a prototype of a non-invasive predictive system that would be easy for doctors and patients to understand, and could lead to the development of personalized treatments to address the disease in its early stages.

About the Scholar: Tianhao Li grew up in China and attended Beijing National Day School in Beijing, China

The Research:

“There is a growing consensus across governments and educational institutions that entrepreneurship is a crucial driver of future economic growth, innovation, and job creation.” This understanding is the basis for Pioneer scholar Tianhao’s decision to research the factors that motivate entrepreneurship in China and the United States, with the goal of encouraging more focused educational opportunities for potential entrepreneurs. Drawing on data provided by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, and using the Theory of Planned Behavior as an analytic tool, Tianhao identified similarities and differences between the two countries, and some anomalous time periods in China that merit further research.

About the Scholar: Qiqing Li grew up in China and attended Shenzhen Middle School in Shenzhen, China

The Research:

In regions that suffer from tsunamis, typhoons, and storms, mangrove forests can protect shorelines and ensure human safety. They act as a natural barrier, stop drifts, and reduce the energy of a tsunami, thereby saving lives. They also offer benefits such as forest products, habitat for fisheries, biofiltration, carbon emission reduction, and recreation and tourism. Nevertheless, mangrove forests are among the most threatened habitats in the world, disappearing at an unsustainable rate. In this paper, Qiqing proposes protecting and restoring this valuable environmental resource through enforcement of existing environmental laws, reforestation, and restoration of proper water flow.

About the scholar: Rushil Roy grew up in the United States, and attended Monte Vista High School in Danville, California, USA

The Research:

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), known for its adherence to and propagation of Hindu nationalist values, has been India’s dominant political power since 1998. Their policies, which include restricting Muslim immigration and framing Muslims as terrorists, led Pioneer scholar Rushil to ask how India’s non-Hindu groups have responded to the BJP’s nationalism. He considers Albert Hirschman’s three “valid responses” to state-sponsored oppression: exit (emigration), voice (advocacy), and loyalty (capitulation), and concludes that in India, the response has instead been primarily political violence in response to the BJP’s “weaponization” of social welfare by denying social services to predominantly minority regions.

About the scholar: Yuting Huang grew up in China and attended Culver Academies in Culver, Indiana, USA

The Research:

Macrophage Migration Inhibition Factor (MIF) has been shown to promote the growth of tumors in several different kinds of cancer. Pioneer scholar Yuting wondered if identifying increased MIF production might be an early indicator of cancer, and if finding ways of counteracting such production might be a promising treatment. She proposes a series of experiments to test MIF levels in patients with and without cancer, and to test the effectiveness of various MIF production suppressors, some of which might be used along with current cancer treatments. The goal is to improve cancer treatment while reducing its harm to the patient.

About the scholar: Ziyang Zheng grew up in China and attended The Experimental High School Attached to Beijing Normal University in Beijing, China

The Research:

“Blockchain technology is used to build a decentralized and anonymous transaction system. With blockchain technology, people no longer need trusted third parties such as banks to build trust between each other.” Since this money-saving new technology is so popular, it is important that it be secure and reliable. Pioneer scholar Ziyang describes the essential parts of the blockchain, ways that the partners in the system can agree on essential details, and some successful applications, including Bitcoin. He then creates his own blockchain application, a way to share information about student activities to make evaluating college applications more efficient.

About the Scholar: Shuyu Chen grew up in China and attended Wuhan Foreign Languages School in Wuhan, China

The Research:

Chinese artist Huang Gongwang and one of the world’s best known Renaissance artists, Leonardo da Vinci, lived and worked two hundred years apart and in entirely different cultures that were not interacting during their lifetimes. Nevertheless, Pioneer scholar Shuyu Chen noticed some clear similarities between Leonardo’s uncharacteristic early work Landscape Drawing for Santa Maria Della Neve, and Huang Gongwang’s The Remaining Mountain, originally part of a much larger scroll that was damaged by fire. Despite obvious differences in materials, size and other physical and artistic characteristics, Shuyu concludes that Leonardo’s work reflects “the Chinese philosophy of appreciating nature.”

About the scholar: Vardaan Tekriwal grew up in Indonesia and attended the Jakarta Intercultural School in Jakarta, Indonesia

The Research:

A Veblen good is one that defies the usual market trend by increasing in sales as its price increases. Pioneer scholar Vardaan theorized that two kinds of “intangible assets” can be used by companies to create more Veblen goods. Marketing and promotion can result in brand recognition; research and development can increase a company’s intellectual and creative rights, such as patents, copyrights and trademarks. Through data analysis of several companies in two distinct sectors, Vardaan concluded that increased brand recognition helps the consumer clothing industry “Veblenize” goods, while intellectual and creative rights are more helpful to the consumer electronics industry.

About the scholar: Yibing Du grew up in China and attended The High School Affiliated to Renmin University of China in Beijing, China

The Research:

From 1890 to 1914, more than 2,000,000 East European Jews emigrated to America. Many of them settled in New York City’s Lower East Side, one of the most crowded and least sanitary areas of the city. Yet Jewish children had a consistently lower mortality rate than most other groups, including American-born citizens. Yibing analyzes the commonly proposed reasons for this surprising statistic—good sanitary habits, low alcoholism, and a strong philanthropic tradition—and concludes that philanthropic activity that provided the community’s own medical resources countered the harmful effects of an anti-Semitism that fostered neglect of the immigrants’ needs.

About the Scholar: Chen Zhou grew up in China and attended Jiaxiang Foreign Languages School attached to Chengdu No. 7 Middle School in Chengdu, China

The Research:

Since about 2006, the emphasis of China’s educational program seems to have shifted from quantity of education to quality. Chen looks at a number of school “facilities,” and compares them with the standardized scores of graduates to look for those that might foster better outcomes. Factors correlated with positive results include larger class size (a surprise), a longer school history, a stronger pupil-teacher ratio, a city location (with a few exceptions), and private ownership, which usually means better financing. The presence of a library and student numbers show no influence. Studying other factors could help clarify these results.

About the Scholar: Tongxin Zhang grew up in China and attended WHBC of Wuhan Foreign Languages School in Wuhan, China

The Research:

Income equality has a close correlation with social well-being, including higher life expectancy, lower crime rates, and a stable economy. Although most governments have instituted policies to lower income inequality, primarily through social spending to support the elderly, low-income households, and other vulnerable groups, income inequality continues to increase. Tongxin examines two developed economies, the US and the UK, to analyze which policies work best to reduce income inequality. He concludes that a combination of progressive taxes (those who earn more pay a higher percentage), sufficiently high government tax income, and sufficiently high targeted spending would be most effective.

About the Scholar: Yuchen Xu grew up in China and attended The High School Affiliated to Renmin University of China in Beijing, China

The Research:

Although information technology use increases constantly, the basic model for how it works has remained the same: the user’s computer connects to the host. This model now has problems of speed and available IP addresses, and a different approach to networking is needed. CCN (Content Centric Networking) focuses on the content being sought rather than the location, raising the problem of routing: how to connect the inquiry with the desired material. Pioneer scholar Yuchen uses this paper to analyze the most common routing methods and proposes a new model: tier-oriented base-storage network (TOBS). With further work, his approach could deliver information with speed and efficiency.

About the Scholar: Lu Zeng grew up in China and attended Shenzhen Foreign Languages School in Shenzhen, China

The Research:

When the world changed on 9/11/2001, the new enemy, terrorism, needed a new kind of hero. Lu suggests that just as the cultural trauma inspired by terrorism was created in part by media coverage of terrorist acts, the creation of “noir heroes” in the tradition of those of the 1940s and 1950s helped address the trauma. Two contrasting examples are The Dark Knight from the Batman series, who helps mitigate the fear of terrorism, and Francis Underwood of House of Cards, a US President who is a terrorist. Lu expects that future events will call for more noir heroes.

About the Scholar: Nabo Yu attended The Webb Schools in Claremont, California, in the United States.

The Research:

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, the accuracy of tests was so variable that some countries chose not to use tests at all, but instead isolate symptomatic individuals. Pioneer scholar Nabo thought computer simulations could shed light on the effects of testing accuracy on the spread of the disease. His SIR model computational calculations confirm that higher testing accuracy can result in reduced disease spread, and show that even lower accuracy testing is useful in slowing the transmission rate. According to Nabo, the model “has possibly offered a basic method of determining acceptable levels of testing accuracy based on the level of social isolation.”

About the scholar: Sarah Liu grew up in China and attended Kent School in Kent, Connecticut, USA.

The Research:

The well-known figures of the Scientific Revolution of the 15th to 18th centuries were men such as Galileo, Copernicus and Kepler. However, although women could not receive formal education in science and were limited in their activities to the domestic sphere, they employed the growing understanding of the nature of the world in their own writings: “recipe books” that covered cookery, domestic medicine, and cosmetics. Pioneer scholar Sarah analyzes the recipes for the least studied of these, cosmetics, in three popular works from the period, and finds the authors had a surprisingly deep experimental knowledge of botany, chemistry and biology.

About the scholar: Sumin Yoon grew up in South Korea and attended The School for the Talented and Gifted in Dallas, Texas, U.S.A.

The Research:

“Although the biological mechanisms of opioid overdose and dependence are thoroughly researched, our understanding of why Americans turn toward opioids in the first place is rarely discussed.” This clear discrepancy led Pioneer scholar Sumin to investigate the causes of addiction through a review of previous studies and his own personal interviews. He concluded that the opioid crisis is driven by “a complex network of socioeconomic factors, medicalization of addiction, social pain, and stress.” Attempts to address the crisis by limiting the availability of opioids and criminalizing abusers without considering the root causes of addition are bound to fail.

About the Scholar: Guankai Zhai grew up in China and attended Jining Confucius International School in Jining and YK Pao School in Shanghai, China.

The Research:

Beginning with the great increase in commercial aviation following World War II, the interaction of cockpit crew members with one another and their increasingly automated aviation systems began to be studied with the goal of preventing accidents. In this paper, Pioneer scholar Guankai traces the history of both the development of cockpit instruments and the attempts to facilitate pilot/crew/instrument interactions through Cockpit Resource Management (CRM) Training Programs. Guankai analyzes six stages of CRM training development from 1981 through the beginning of the 21st century, and concludes that similar kinds of training could benefit such increasingly automated fields as medical surgery.

About the Scholar: Cheng Xu grew up in China and attended WHBC of Wuhan Foreign Languages School in Wuhan, China.

The Research:

At least one in ten Chinese adults suffers from diabetes, accounting for 13% of national healthcare expenditure. Computer apps can provide reminders and monitor conditions to help people with diabetes make the lifestyle changes that are necessary to control the disease, but Cheng found only 40 Chinese apps, compared with 260 available on iTunes for the iPhone. She concludes that “the Chinese diabetes apps market is immature and needs improvement,” and recommends the creation of apps that would help provide patients with access to the entire range of services, potentially creating a 120-billion-yuan industry and saving countless lives.

About the Scholar: Xiangyu Zheng grew up in China and attended the International Department of the Affiliated High School of South China Normal University in Guangzhou, China.

The Research:

More than five million Syrian refugees have fled the country since 2011. Lebanon, with a pre-conflict population of four million people, hosts one million refugees, and China, with the world’s second-largest economy and a population of 1.3 billion, has accepted fewer than 30. To analyze whether China has a responsibility to do more, Xiangyu analyzes the issue from the perspective of the UN Refugee Convention and three theoretical positions: cosmopolitanism, utilitarianism, and communitarianism. Based on his own “pragmatic cosmopolitanism,” he concludes that China could realistically offer strong support and a high quality of life to two million Syrian refugees.

About the scholar: Kehui Guo grew up in China and attended Beijing World Youth Academy in Beijing, China.

The Research:

Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy claims to prove the existence of a perfect God and the immortality of the human soul. It relies in large part on the “dream argument,” which notes the difficulty human beings often have in distinguishing between very realistic dreams and being awake. Descartes concludes that one can distinguish between the dreaming experience and the waking experience because of the reliability of one’s memory. Kehui’s paper challenges this assumption with recent scientific information about the unreliability of memory. He concludes that Descartes’ circular reasoning makes his argument unconvincing.

About the Scholar: Ruibing Xu grew up in China and attended Shenzhen Foreign Languages School in Shenzhen, China.

The Research:

Primary spontaneous pneumothorax (PSP), the accumulation of gas in the pleural cavity without underlying lung disease, is a common problem. Women and people who are taller and thinner have the highest risk of recurrence. Ruibing’s paper proposes an experiment to determine whether the under expression of certain hormones and/or growth-related proteins might lead to both increased height and decreased weight, and the higher risk for recurrence of PCP.  Her results could lead to the development of more precise and effective treatments, both improving the quality of life for many people and reducing health care costs.

About the Scholar: Sahana Prasanna grew up in the United States and attended Monta Vista High School in Cupertino, California.

The Research:

Traditional Western music is mostly based on two-beat or three-beat patterns. Eastern music can be quite different in structure. Pioneer scholar Sahana, who has been studying South Indian Carnatic music, assumed that the five-beat and seven-beat patterns of much of this music must be ingrained in the intuition of people who grew up with it. She wondered how people whose experience is of Western music could develop the intuition, execution and perception necessary to understand and respond to this music. She found that, contrary to her expectations, seven-beat patterns were easier than five-beat patterns for Western listeners to perceive.

About the Scholar: Xinshi Ma grew up in China and Egypt and attended BASIS International School Shenzhen in Shenzhen, China.

The Research:

For the 30 years of Hosni Mubarak’s presidency, Egypt’s military played a much smaller role in the economy than it had under the two previous leaders, Nasser and Sadat. After the 2011 Revolution, the military became more active again. Pioneer scholar Xinshi wondered if, under military leadership, the country’s economy showed more actual strength than the superficial growth of Mubarak’s days, which was offset by widespread corruption. He concluded that on the whole, the military was protecting its own interests and major concerns still remain: continuing political corruption, stifling of competition, mismanagement of public resources, and inhibition of institutional reform.