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MAGIC

Mentee Presentation

Date 5/19/2024

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Agenda

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Jodi M

7th Grade | Las Flores School | Las Flores, CA

Link to Intro from Mentor, Iris

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My Mentor

  • A few bullet points about your mentor
    • Iris works in amazon
    • Product manager
    • She is from Seattle but original form India
    • Skiing, reading, cooking

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My Project

Project Title: “Women In STEM”

Project Type: Mobile app

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Selection Criteria: I selected this project because I was inspired from reading a book about Women in stem called “Good Night Stories For Rebel Girls”. My main goal was to to spread awareness about women in STEM and let people learn about them and get inspired through my project.

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Accomplishments to date:

  • Finished version 1 of the app which highlights three accomplished women.
  • Users can go to independent screens dedicated to these women and watch a video to learn more about them.

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Future plans:

  • Include accessibility: users can not only watch videos but also read content.
  • Expand this into an educational app
  • Add more women in STEM and update project into a more advanced app.

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My MAGICal Experience

    • I got to learn how to build code
    • I have used the “MIT App Inventor” which helped me build my project
    • I improved in making block coding
    • I learnt that there are many ways of generating or building the same code through different ways
    • The challenges are usually learning and researching new things and getting through difficulties

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My Project Journey

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Final outcome

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More details

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Coding process

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Video demo

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Thank you!

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Questions?

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Ella Abrams

11th Grade | Sacred Heart Preparatory | Atherton, CA

Link to Intro from Mentor, Julie

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My Mentor

  • Julie Dubin
    • Fort Collins, Colorado
    • The Executive Director of a nonprofit organization called Peaks to People Water Fund
      • Works to reduce the impacts of wildfires on our water supply here in Northern Colorado
    • Volunteers with the Immigrant and Refugee Center of Northern Colorado
      • Supporting young preschool aged students with English acquisition and adjusting to life in Colorado.
    • In her free time, she loves to hike and spend time in nature, like watching sunsets.

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My Project

  • Overview
    • The Challenges and Advances of Newborn Screening (NBS) for Urea Cycle Disorders (UCDs) in the United States.
    • A Research Paper/ Academic Poster
    • I chose this project because it is a current issue which I felt I could research thoroughly and have an impact on through spreading awareness. It was also a topic I could be biologically, technologically and ethically curious about.

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My Project

  • Overview
    • Newborn Screening and Applications
    • Urea Cycle Disorders
    • Public Health Initiatives for UCDs
      • Clinical Challenges
      • Technical Challenges
      • Ethical Component
        • Opportunity Cost
        • Criteria Setting

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Early Detection Matters: Exploring Newborn Screening for Urea Cycle Disorders

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Newborn Screening (NBS)

  • Most widespread application of screening technology and provides the most comprehensive application of genetics in health services
  • 40 years of use and significant benefits to 100,000 children worldwide
  • Guthrie blood spot cards
  • Required Parameters to develop a mass screening test

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Protein Metabolism & Urea Cycle Disorders (UCDs)

  • A disease that affects how the body removes waste after breaking down protein into amino acids

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  • Urea Cycle Disorders are genetic.

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The Urea Cycle

  • Normally, ammonia is produced in the colon and small intestine. Then transported to the liver to be converted to urea via the urea cycle.
  • A group of recessive and one X-linked inherited errors of protein metabolism, due to insufficient detoxification of excess nitrogen and can lead to severe neurological diseases
  • Only surrogate marker of UCDs is the mild to severe hyperammonemia

→ Drastic clinical complications, early diagnosis before symptoms is desirable

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Public Health & UCDs

  • Urea Cycle Disorders are not a regulated metabolic disease for Newborn Screening in the United States
  • OTCD is the most common UCD subtype- only screened for in Connecticut, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont.

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Technical Challenges

  • The direct measurement of ammonia is not feasible in NBS
  • Glutamine and orotic acid are unfortunately highly unstable
  • Absence of universal screening parameter for all UCDs

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Clinical Challenges

  • Symptoms occur soon after birth between 12 and 72 hours of age
  • Patients may then rapidly deteriorate
  • It will take about three days until the results become available
  • Late onset disease patients→ milder symptoms with no need for medical intervention

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Ethical Components

  • For late onset patients, is the neonatal screening diagnosis really worth it?
    • Unnecessary medical intervention and unwanted stress
  • Opportunity cost
    • What must be considered when deciding what healthcare measures to fund over others

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My Progress & Future Steps

Discussed this topic with local physicians and science teachers. Online research, including peer-reviewed scientific journal articles and am planning to formulate it all into a scientific paper with the help of MAGIC and Julie Dubin and an academic poster with my high school biology teacher.

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My MAGICal Experience

  • Highlights
    • Getting to know my mentor via our weekly check-in questions
    • The moments when new topics “clicked”
  • Lessons learnt
    • How to read scientific literature
    • Filtering information
  • Challenges
    • Approaching contradicting information from different sources
    • Answering certain biological questions that came up
    • Fully comprehending the Urea Cycle

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Thank you!

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Questions?

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Joanna Pegiel

12th Grade | Liceum w Chmurze | Cracow, Poland

Link to Intro from Mentor, Tejal

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My Mentor

  • Tejal Chinoy
    • She has transitioned from a 25+ year career in tech to pursue her true passion which is to advocate for more representation of girls in STEM
    • We both like reading, nature and travelling

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Topics and technologies learned

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  • Data visualization and analysis in Python
  • Creating a website using github pages
  • Python libraries:
    • NumPy
    • Matplotlib
    • Pandas
    • Lightkurve

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My Project

  • My project is analysis of light curves from binary star systems using Lightkurve library for Python. (Binary star systems are systems consisting of two stars that orbit around a common center of mass due to their gravitational attraction. Light curves are a visual representation of changes in brightness over time)

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My Project

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  • I want to present my results in the form of graphs and data tables.

I selected this project because it’s related to my previous work, which also consisted of analysis of contact binaries’ light curves:

https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2024CoSka..54b.164D/abstract

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But here I wanted to focus on it from a coding point of view, so learning how to program things I previously had to do manually.

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Lightkurve

I wrote a code to create 9 graphs of Kepler-47 system:

  • Raw
  • Periodogram
  • Folded
  • Binned
  • Detrended
  • Folded scattered
  • Transit mask

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Kepler-47

Kepler-43

Kepler-45

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Progress & future work

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  • Completed:
    • Finished a course on data analysis from Code Academy
    • Researched topics necessary to understand properties of Lightkurve
    • Experimented with properties of Lightkurve
    • Used Lightkurve functions to visualize the light curve and analyzed the graph of Kepler-47
    • Created a personal website

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  • To do:
    • Continue to add content and refine my personal website

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My MAGICal Experience

My experiences

    • It was great getting a better idea of what I want the final project to be, and learning more about my topic.
    • I loved having the opportunity to work with Tejal, and how helpful and motivating it has been so far.

What I learned

    • I learned that nothing I learn is useless, and the knowledge I gain will always come in handy at some point.
    • I also learned that it’s okay to take things a bit slower, and I don’t have to get the perfect results on my first try

Challenges I faced

    • The project I chose is something completely new to me and with not many resources to learn from, so it’s sometimes hard to navigate new steps

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Website demo

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Thank you!

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Questions?

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