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THURJ Research Competition

Led by Harvard students to promote research experience and skills for high school students.

  • Write a research article in any field you're passionate about! No past research experience is necessary or required!

  • Open to all HS students!

  • Work in teams of up to four! Receive mentorship from experienced Harvard researchers and peer reviewers!

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2024 Awards

Congratulations to our inaugural high school research competition winners!

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First Place: Disha Gupta

Second Place: Aditya Shivakumar

Third Place: Churan Xu

Fourth Place: Nathan Hu

Fifth Place: Saanvi Bhargava

Award Winners Features:

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1st Place

Disha Gupta

Summary of Work

There is a huge and growing disparity in global breast cancer care: mortality rates stand at 7% in the US, compared to 27% in India and 60% in Africa. This is primarily because of the delay in diagnosis and late-stage intervention in developing countries. This study focuses on reducing global breast cancer mortality and cost of care by enabling accurate, early, low-cost diagnosis using the existing ultrasound infrastructure and medical expertise in underserved communities and applying generative AI and a hybrid deep-learning architecture.

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3rd Place

Churan Xu

Summary of Work

Lila Abu-Lughod and Saba Mahmood are pioneering anthropologists who ground their ethnography in underprivileged communities across the Middle East. In this essay, I explore how they utilize desire as an anchoring concept to expand on the meaning of agency and freedom amongst the backdrop of an overarching Islamic patriarchy, highlighting how their work aims to defy the top-bottom conclusions of the Western gaze and Orientalism with concrete storytelling.

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5th Place

Saanvi Bhargava

Summary of Work

This work presents a Machine Learning model for automatically grading vocal music recordings cumulatively on pitch and rhythm, given a reference piece of music. In addition, a correspondence algorithm is also presented, which is used to map notes in the performance sample to the notes in the reference sample and subsequently give granular feedback on a note level, such as pitch mismatch, notes started late, missed notes, and many other factors. 

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2nd Place

Aditya Shivakumar

Summary of Work

Cepheid variable stars act as "cosmic candles," offering standard measurements of cosmic distances due to their intrinsic Period-Luminosity (P-L) relationship. Therefore, accurate classification into Delta Cepheids (DCEP), Type II Cepheids (T2CEP), and Anomalous Cepheids (ACEP) is crucial for refining the cosmic distance ladder. To address this classification problem, we employ Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) autoencoders to extract latent features from phase-folded photometric light curves and introduce a novel feature, L2DCEP, based on the Period-Wesenheit relationship.

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4th Place

Nathan Hu

Summary of Work

Despite growing public concerns about high school students’ mental health, research into how kindness-based interventions affect their subjective well-being remains scant. This study addresses three research gaps in kindness-based interventions: adolescent-peer leadership throughout the experiment, administration outside laboratory or classroom settings, and applicability to boarding high school students.  This peer-led, simple, and cost-effective kindness-based intervention can be readily replicated by student leaders in day and boarding high schools on a sustainable and scalable basis, bolstering subjective well-being at both individual and school community levels.

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Best Manuscript for Underrepresented Researchers

Lucia Martinez-Pelaez, Meredith Ho, Richard Cavaliere-Mazziotta,  Jacob Parker

Summary of Work

Our paper dives deeply into the neurological as well as social effects of pornography consumption on adolescents. Looking at the issue from a neurological standpoint, we highlight the desensitization and dysfunction that is created due to avid porn consumption in this age group. Looking at this subject from a social stance, pornography negatively affects adolescents' relationships and behaviors due to the unrealistic portrayal of sex it creates. 

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