Eric S. Smith '30 University Fellows Endowment Fund

The purpose of this project was to determine the steady state concentration of microplastics in freshwater clams, collected from various aquatic bodies in upstate New York. The concentration of microplastic in clam soft tissue as well as in clam fecal matter was determined through the chemical digestion procedure that utilized in situ Fenton’s reagent to break down organic material. Results showed that the mass of clam soft tissues have a positive correlation with the amount of reagent that had to be added.

Sports analytics are a constantly growing field, but little work has been done to incorporate analytics to video games. This summer through my project, I wanted to see if similar tools that are used in professional sports could be applied to sports video games, specifically to predict Rocket League game outcome. I utilized a variety of statistical learning methods to investigate which statistics were most positively or negatively associated with winning, and built a random forest model that classified games as wins/losses correctly with almost 90% accuracy.

Currently most general consumer prosthetics are basic devices with limited functionality and while sophisticated prosthetics with advanced motion and sensation do exist, they are at a price point out of reach for the general consumer. While there are groups working on increasing the motion and sensation capabilities of prosthetics, often there is not a focus on developing them at low price points and thus they are too expensive for the general consumer. That’s where my research comes in.