Bass Connections Projects That May Interest Engineering Students

January 20, 2018

Bass Connections projects

We present the following sampling of 2018-19 Bass Connections projects that may be of interest to undergraduate and graduate engineering students. Learn more by reviewing the full project descriptions, and come to the E-Social on February 2.

Applications are due on February 16 at 5:00 p.m.


Project Teams Led by Pratt Faculty

Oculomotor Response as an Objective Assessment for Mild TBI in the Pediatric Population

In children, brain injury is both common and complex. Sports-related concussions in children and adolescents account for 30-60% of all pediatric concussions. Though mild traumatic brain injury is an important public health issue for both the general pediatric population and youth athletes, challenges exist in obtaining objective diagnoses of mTBI. This project will assess youth athletes with an oculomotor assessment routine that can aid in objectively diagnosing concussions and quantifying the pathophysiology of cumulative subconcussive insults to the pediatric brain.

Duke Undergraduate International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) Team

Rapid advances in synthetic and systems biology, metabolic and enzyme engineering and nanotechnology are having profound impacts on biotechnology and related engineering fields. This project will select a contemporary societal problem, including challenges to human health and disease, global health, sustainability and bioenergy, then propose and build a synthetic biological solution composed of a genetically engineered microbial machine.

Smart Archaeology

Smart technologies involve the use of collaborative and intelligent tools able to automate activities performed in the environment and in everyday objects. In archaeology, smart technologies include sensors, close range sensing systems, robots, rovers, drones, laser scanners and software able to process data from multiple sources. In 2018-19, five research units will collaborate on the archaeological investigation and study of Mediterranean cities dating back to the first millennium BCE.

Low-cost Laparoscopic Surgery with Tele-mentoring for Low-income Countries

In the 1980s, the field of surgery advanced with the development of laparoscopy, a technology that allowed surgeons to make two to four small incisions and operate with an intra-abdominal camera and instruments. The benefits of laparoscopic surgery compared to open surgery are extensive; however, laparoscopic surgery is expensive and demands a great amount of infrastructure to maintain the equipment. These costs are prohibitive to low- and middle-income countries, and therefore most surgeries in these countries are performed with the traditional, open approach. This project’s goal is to develop a low-cost, reusable laparoscope with a design that will allow images to be transferred over the internet, enabling surgeons in high- and low-income countries to interact in real-time during surgical cases, thus allowing for “tele-mentoring.”

Pocket Colposcope: Analysis of Bridging Elements of Referral Services to Primary/Community Care

Cervical cancer is highly preventable through the screening, diagnosis and treatment of cervical precursor lesions. Colposcopy with biopsy is the gold standard for diagnosis; however, colposcopes are expensive, and require referral to specialized facilities with a trained colposcopist. To address this limitation, Duke researchers developed the Pocket Colposcope, which is significantly less expensive and lighter than commercial colposcopes. This project seeks to understand the best practices for creating a training program for community-level providers and to develop a training manual based on feedback from community health providers working with La Liga Contra el Cancer in Peru. The team’s goal is to demonstrate that the Pocket Colposcope is an economically viable solution in the community health setting.

Problem-based Learning to Improve Girls’ Math Identity

Women continue to be underrepresented in STEM fields in the United States. The gender gap in STEM fields exists at all levels, from childhood through career selection, and there are many causes for female underrepresentation found in recent research on the topic. Two major causes are students’ math identity—their beliefs, attitudes and emotions about math—and societal views around gender as it relates to fields of study. This project aims to inspire girls to change their own relationships with math both by building confidence, ownership and self-sufficiency in problem-solving and by building awareness of gender stereotypes and their potential impacts.

Virtual Avatar Coaches: Improving Mental Health Treatment for College Students with Accessible Peer Support

Every year, approximately 25% of American adults are living with a diagnosable mental illness. College students are a particularly high-risk group; students face a multitude of stressors that can exacerbate underlying predispositions to mental illness. There are significant barriers to the delivery and effectiveness of mental health services for college students, including feelings of personal shame and ambiguity about the need for treatment as well as skepticism about treatment effectiveness. The use of trained teams of virtual peer health coaches (“avatars”) has the potential to address these barriers. This project will develop and pilot an innovative way to improve the mental health of college students, through the use of peer health coaches who will deliver support via virtual avatars.

ACRE-Duke Partnership to Improve Sanitation Access in Lowndes County, Alabama

Stories of failing and inadequate water infrastructure in urban areas of the U.S. have caught the attention of the media and the public. Less attention has been paid to the ways in which the absence or poor quality of existing infrastructure can undermine health and economic opportunities in rural America. Lowndes County is illustrative of a host of social and environmental inequalities facing rural communities of color in the American South, including endemic poverty, lack of economic opportunity, hazardous health conditions and inadequate infrastructure. This project aims to understand the reasons for the lack of proper sanitation in Lowndes County, improve sanitation access in the county and explore racial and economic justice in rural America.

DECIPHER: Case Studies in Drinking Water Quality

The technologies, processes and products we develop have impacts on our environment and health. Some impacts are intended; others are not. Policies adopted to regulate the risks of such developments may themselves pose unintended consequences. These complexities pose challenges for private innovation and public oversight, and present opportunities to improve understanding and decision-making. The goal of Decisions on Complex Interdisciplinary Problems of Health and Environmental Risk (DECIPHER) is to improve understanding of risks through the design, research and generation of a comprehensive profile motivated by a specific risk and then to expand the scope to include contexts, decisions and outcomes. This project will focus on decision scenarios related to drinking water quality.

Energy and the Environment: Design and Innovation

This project explores the breadth of issues that confront our society in its need for clean, affordable and reliable energy by partnering students with faculty on projects resulting in prototypes of new energy technologies, systems or approaches. Last year’s team focused on the potential of incorporating green building concepts into dorms, alternative use cases for flywheel energy storage and renewable microgrids in South Africa. Previous projects have included a strategy proposal for encouraging growth in the hydrogen economy, a human-powered bicycle to filter urban water systems and a biogas-powered generator.

Energy Data Analytics Lab: Energy Infrastructure Map of the World through Satellite Data

Over 15% of humanity has no access to electricity, and far more have unreliable access that precludes most productive energy uses that are beneficial for improving economic prosperity, health and education. Decision-makers require information to determine the optimal strategies for deploying energy resources. However, two critical data sources for such planning are often unavailable or overly time-consuming to collect and maintain: who has access to electricity; and the location of electric infrastructure. To address these needs, this project team will work toward creating an energy infrastructure map of the world using satellite imagery and state-of-the-art machine learning tools to detect critical energy infrastructure.

Environmental Epidemiology in Latin America: Impacts of Artisanal Gold Mining in the Peruvian Amazon

Artisanal and small-scale gold mining is the largest source of global mercury pollution and the leading cause of deforestation in the Peruvian Amazon. This type of mining emits large amounts of mercury directly into atmospheric, terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems and impacts human and wildlife health. The primary research goal for this project is to understand and communicate how mercury enters upstream communities and wildlife, and whether deforestation is altering this movement of mercury.

Project Teams Whose Leaders Seek Engineering Students

Emotional Connection: Developing a Mobile Intervention for Social and Emotional Dysfunction

Social isolation and lack of intimate relationships have been tied to severe adverse consequences, including poor health outcomes and premature mortality. The epidemic of social isolation may be a strong driving factor behind the increasing rates of mental health problems in the U.S. Given the severity of this public health crisis, there is a pressing need for new interventions that target and treat problems with social functioning. One potential target is emotion perception deficits. This project will test the effects of a mindfulness-based intervention on the ability to perceive other people’s emotions in order to study whether teaching people to using mindfulness can improve their social skills.

Evaluating Interventions Aimed at Improving Neurosurgical Patient Outcomes in Uganda

Since 2007, Duke Global Neurosurgery and Neuroscience has been partnering to strengthen Uganda’s health system in order to improve neurosurgical care. The long-term vision includes having 20 Uganda-trained neurosurgeons equitably spread across the country, increasing the number of facilities capable of providing neurosurgical operations, improving the infrastructure for neurosurgical care delivery and developing a Uganda Neuroscience Institute. Within this larger framework, this project will evaluate which interventions actually improve neurosurgical patient outcomes and are efficient and cost effective.

Using Machine Learning to Generate Clinical Prediction Rules for Clinical Outcomes in Schizophrenia

The worldwide economic burden associated with caring for patients with schizophrenia has doubled in the last 10 years. Patients with schizophrenia are high utilizers of emergency department (ED) services because of relapse, which may be caused by psychoactive substance use, not taking medications as prescribed and/or lack of efficacy of interventions. These patients frequently need inpatient care, but insufficient resources lead to a situation in which patients are often kept in the ED. This project aims to foster effective allocation of resources by assessing relapse risk and applying community supports and priority inpatient beds according to risk.

Using Neuroscience to Optimize Digital Health Interventions across Adulthood

Most people know that being more physically active is good for them, but many still don’t do it. While clinical trials have demonstrated the efficacy of exercise programs for enhancing cognition and well-being in older age, a persistent challenge is how to motivate aging adults to engage in physical activity in their daily lives. The goal of this project is to combine approaches from neuroscience, psychology and global health to identify ways to individually motivate adults to become more physically active in daily life.

Big Data for Reproductive Health

One-third of women who begin using a modern method of contraception in low-income countries discontinue within the first year, and half within the first two years, putting them at risk for unintended pregnancies as well as maternal morbidity and mortality. The current method of measuring contraceptive discontinuation does not show the granular details often needed to develop programs to effect change. This project aims to curate available data into an online, user-friendly tool, apply advanced data analysis techniques and develop methods for collecting big data to provide dynamic information to family planning researchers and advocates.

Building Duke: The Architectural History of Duke Campus from 1924 to the Present

Building Duke is a new initiative that will explore the conception, design and construction of the Duke campus as well as its changes and expansions. The principal aims are to offer an historical narrative of the physical environment that the Duke community inhabits and to explore the desires and visions that have materialized in the making of the campus. This project will focus on the identification, collection, organization and digitization of textual and visual material from the University Archives in order to develop a timeline of Duke’s buildings, landscape and infrastructure and a series of historical narratives along thematic axes such as patronage, architectural design, labor and race.

Data and Technology for Fact-checking

Our society is struggling with an unprecedented amount of falsehoods, hyperboles and half-truths that do harm to democracy, health, economy and national security. Fact-checking is a vital tool for defending against this onslaught. Despite the rise of fact-checking efforts globally, fact-checkers are increasingly overwhelmed and find it difficult to reach some segments of the public with their messages. This project seeks to leverage the power of data and computing to help make fact-checking and dissemination of fact-checks to the public more effective, scalable and sustainable.

Enabling Precision Health and Medicine

The sequencing of the human genome heralded a new era in biomedical research. A key result has been the development of genomics-based tools to diagnose, predict disease onset or recurrence, tailor treatment options and assess treatment response. These advancements developed concurrently with electronic medical records, digital technologies and the shift toward patient-centered care. As a result of new tools to characterize biospecimens and collect personal data, researchers face an influx of heterogeneous datasets. This project will focus on the challenges in developing applications to support healthy living (precision health) and improve patient care (precision medicine).

How Do Cyberattacks Hurt Me?

Data breaches and computer hacks are occurring at an alarming pace, exposing consumers’ financial information to misappropriation. From the perspective of resilience, financial firms, public policy experts and financial regulators need to understand pathways to harm from such breaches in order to design security systems that protect financial information and identify points of intervention that can limit such harms. From the perspective of risk, an understanding of these pathways can be modeled and aspects of the harm can be quantified. This project will discern, explore and model these pathways to harm in order to further discussions regarding optimal design and intervention.

Moral Artificial Intelligence

Autonomous agents are beginning to interact with humans on a regular basis. Self-driving cars are appearing on local streets, and various types of drones are flying through skies over populated areas. These autonomous agents have promise to provide many services that will benefit society, but they also raise significant concerns. The goal of this project is to combine computational methods, philosophy, game theory and psychology to develop a robust moral artificial intelligence to direct autonomous agents.

Developing a Mobile Phone-based Community Health Program for Hypertension Control in Nepal

Cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of death and disability in many low- and middle-income countries. With a nearly 100% mobile phone ownership rate in the country, Nepal’s Ministry of Health has prioritized mHealth interventions. This project will collaborate with Nepal’s female community health volunteer program and Medic Mobile to develop design insights and feature-phone-based programs, creating a foundation for interventions on hypertension prevention and control.

Vaccine Misinformation and Its Link to Vaccine Hesitancy and Uptake in Durham

Vaccinations administered during pregnancy and the first year of a child’s life are crucial for preventing a myriad of potentially deadly and debilitating infections. Despite overwhelming evidence on the benefits of vaccinations, pregnant women and parents of young children often refuse to accept, or choose to space out, vaccinations for themselves or their children. This phenomenon is blamed for several vaccine-preventable outbreaks in the U.S. In order to design effective behavior change interventions, we need to understand the role of misinformation. This project will study vaccine misinformation and its impact on vaccine hesitancy and uptake in Durham.

OSPRI Lab

Open Source Pedagogy, Research + Innovation (OSPRI), a Duke-Red Hat partnership, applies open source principles and methodologies to teaching and learning. This project addresses the gap between how learning occurs outside and inside academic settings—between the participatory, social, crowdsourced, self-directed learning students authentically engage in beyond the classroom, and the industrial-era, hierarchical-driven teaching occurring in many classrooms. In 2018-19, members of the OSPRI Lab will research and share knowledge about open source principles and methodologies within educational contexts; identify a critical education technology product need at Duke and work to develop an open source education technology product; and mentor students in computer science at Durham public schools using a Duke student-developed open source curriculum.

Developing Rapid, Cost-effective Methods for Evaluating Coastal Biodiversity and Resilience

Coastal habitats such as oyster reefs, salt marshes, seagrass and mangroves are essential for resilient communities but under threat from sea-level rise and anthropogenic disturbance. Our traditional reaction to encroaching seas is to modify the shoreline through the use of hardened structures. Only recently have we begun considering adopting the more natural living shoreline, which involves intertidal vegetation plantings sometimes coupled with oyster reefs as breakwaters. One of the largest hurdles is the dearth of knowledge of living shorelines’ resilience and the services restored shorelines provide. This project will work with governmental and nongovernmental organizations to create tools for coastline conservation practices.

From the Ground Up: The Business and Policy Landscape for Energy Access in East Africa

Access to electricity and other forms of modern energy is crucial to development. Yet about 1.1 billion people lack access to electricity, and another billion have unreliable access. While a number of public and private actors have entered the market, a substantial investment gap remains. Understanding the barriers to investment is essential for addressing the needs of the households, communities and enterprises that lack access to modern energy sources. This project aims to understand the energy access problem and potential solutions from the perspective of people who are dealing with it firsthand.

Marine Microalgae for Sustainable Production of Food and Fuel

Climate, energy and food security are three of the greatest challenges we face in this century. Large-scale industrial cultivation of marine microalgae has been shown to be a promising, environmentally-favorable approach for society to meet its climate goals by sustainably coproducing liquid hydrocarbon fuels and protein. Current models have shown that this coproduction of food and fuel is approaching economic feasibility. This project will advance research on algal life cycles, biofuel production models and economic and environmental costs.

Mega-gardeners of Tropical Forests: Modeling Seed Dispersal by Forest Elephants

Elephants are ecological engineers that create and maintain forest habitat. However, poaching is wiping out African forest elephants, which will result in dramatic ecological changes. Through collaboration with the Gabon Parks Agency, Duke researchers have two years of data on hourly movements of 56 forest elephants. However, there are no data on the time it takes a seed to pass through a forest elephant’s gut. This project will conduct experiments in Gabon to estimate gut passage time in forest elephants for several plant species. The team will then model seed dispersal and evaluate the consequences of differences in dispersal patterns for forest plants.

Ocean Evidence Gap Map

Evidence gap maps are emerging as conservation tools that synthesize scientific research in a creative way, in order to guide decision-making and identify areas where more targeted research is needed. Gap maps also help identify studies that suggest linkages between particular interventions and outcomes and can help identify and characterize contexts for understanding tradeoffs and synergies in conservation decision-making. In collaboration with the World Wildlife Fund, this project will develop an ocean evidence gap map with a subset of evidence gap maps on coral reefs, mangroves and seagrasses.

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