Team Projects

Team Projects are a hallmark of PGSS and allow students to conduct scientific research with peers who are as passionate about the work as they are. Projects are led by a faculty member who provides a general idea or topic for research. The team members develop the project from those general guidelines by developing their own hypotheses, designing experiments, analyzing data, and drawing conclusions. Each year there are between 10 and 15 projects to choose from.

Team Projects meet for 3 hours a day twice a week in the first four weeks of the program. Week 5 of PGSS is designated "Team Project Week" when students wrap up program activity and spend most of their academic time working on their proejcts. 

PGSS culminates in the PGSS Scientifc Symposium during which the teams present their work to their peers in the program, faculty, and invitied guests. In addition, students prepare a formal scientific paper to be submitted on the last day of the program that is published in the Journal of PGSS. 

Selected Team Project Descriptions from 2024

Investigating the DNA damage response due to UV exposure using immunofluorescence | Getting a sunburn increases the likelihood of suffering from melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer.  The sun’s ultraviolet (UV) rays not only cause sunburn, but also cause mutations at the genetic level in cells which may lead to cancer.  In this team project, students will investigate the DNA damage response caused by UV exposure using the model organism, Saccharomyces cerevisiae (baker’s yeast).  Baker’s yeast is a single-celled eukaryote, and therefore shares many similar genes with humans, which makes it a good model organism to investigate DNA damage.  We will induce mutations in the yeast using UV exposure and creating killing curves.  We will then investigate how the mutations affect the yeast using a variety of molecular biology techniques, including DNA isolation, gel electrophoresis, and indirect immunofluorescent microscopy.  We will finally investigate how sunscreen can reduce these damaging UV effects. Keywords: immunofluorescence, microscopy, DNA damage, molecular biology, agarose gel electrophoresis, DNA

Examining the Quality of Dietary Supplements | National surveys indicate that more than half of American adults take some form of dietary supplement; botanicals comprise about 25% of the supplement market. These products are used by consumers to promote health and wellness and to prevent and treat disease. Quality of these products is one of the greatest uncertainties that consumers, clinicians, regulators, and researchers face. Contrary to popular belief, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) cannot legally regulate dietary supplements since Congress passed the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994—commonly referred to as “DSHEA.”   Most US supplement users are unaware of this lack of regulation. The lack of FDA regulation means that supplements may not contain the active ingredient(s) listed on the label.

In this project we will quantify both water- and fat-soluble vitamins in over-the-counter (OTC) supplements to determine if they match their label-stated amounts. After purifying the vitamin using wet chemistry, the Scholars will use analytical and statistical methods from the chemical literature, including but not limited to HPLC/MS, RP-HPLC/UV-VIS, HPLC-DAD, and/or HPLC-FLD, and NIST standards for each vitamin. The chemistry project’s goal is not only to increase the Scholars’ chemical knowledge and skill, but also to increase their critical thinking skills concerning dietary supplements. Keywords: analytical chemistry, chromatography, spectrophotometric detection, mass spectrometry, vitamin, dietary supplement

Turn-Based Game Strategy | Designing algorithms to play turn-based games has been a pursuit of many programmers since computers began.  In 1997, IBM programmers wrote an algorithm to defeat chess champion Garry Kasparov.  It was not until 2017 that a computer algorithm was able to beat the best go players in the world.  In this project, the students will choose a turn-based game of moderate complexity (such as Reversi, Mancala, Connect-4, or Pente, there are many good games out there for this project) and design an algorithm to play the game, including a simple interface for a human to challenge the algorithm. Each project will have 4-6 students, and there will be up to three different projects of this type. Keywords:  Artificial Intelligence, Algorithms

Expansion of the Veil Nebula Supernova Remnant | The Allegheny Observatory has a 24" PlaneWave telescope with remote observing capabilities. Students will visit the observatory one afternoon for a tour and to learn to operate the telescope. One or two class periods will be replaced with nighttime observing with the students operating the telescope from campus. The team will image the Veil Nebula, an old supernova remnant. Comparisons with historical images should show expansion and possibly other changes. We will explore the possibility of using modern filters to mimic the response of old photographic technology allowing better comparison with historic images. Keywords: Globular cluster, Hertzsprung-Russell diagram

Chaos and Nonlinear Dynamics in Physical Systems | In everyday parlance the terms “chaos” and “randomness” are often used interchangeably.  However, in physics and mathematics these terms are distinctly different.  Chaos, in the precise physical sense of the word, refers to the behavior of certain nonlinear dynamical systems which are completely deterministic (one can write down the differential equation and solve it), yet are unpredictable in the long term, due to extreme sensitivity to initial conditions.  Participants in this project will explore the range of possible behaviors of a bi-stable mechanical oscillator, which can be driven into a chaotic state under just the right set of conditions (the choice of frequency and amplitude of the driving force).  The goal is to quantify the various behaviors in terms of a so-called “fractal dimension” – a measure of the extent to which the position and velocity of the system fill a 2-dimensional space.  A totally random system will have a “dimension” of 2, filling 2-dimensional position-velocity space uniformly, with no correlation between position and velocity. A perfectly periodic system will have a “dimension” of 1 (perfect correlation between position and velocity). In contrast, a chaotic system will have a “fractional dimension” somewhere between 1 and 2, depending on the parameters of the system.  Other possible explorations may include the behaviors of nonlinear electrical circuits or nonlinear optical systems, which may exhibit behaviors similar to the bi-stable mechanical oscillator. Keywords:  Chaos, nonlinear dynamics