If you are interested in pursuing STEM as your major in college, you should consider doing research while in high school. Research forms the very foundation of STEM courses and it also allows for applying all concepts you learn theoretically.

Having engaged in research helps you stand out when applying to colleges and STEM programs. It might even be possible that some of the research you’ve pursued is what is being taught in one of the college subjects! If you dream of working in cutting-edge science or tech, experience in having done research projects early will be an advantage.

One of the issues you might face when looking to pursue research in STEM areas as a high school student is how to get started. To help you get things rolling, in this blog, we detail 10 research ideas in STEM for high school students. 

1. Biomedical Engineering

Biomedical Engineering is one of the fastest-growing interdisciplinary sciences. Biomedical engineering has become increasingly important given its value in making incredible advancements in healthcare. Think of things like wearable gadgets that monitor your health or even growing new organs! It's like science fiction, but it's real.

• Wearable Health Devices: Delve into the potential of wearables in real-time health monitoring and early disease detection. To get the most out of future wearables, researchers are exploring all stages of their design, production, and use. For example, you can check out how Stanford scientists devised a smartwatch-based “alarm system” that goes off when it detects signs of infection, here. 

• Nanotechnology in Drug Delivery: Explore how nanoscale innovations can enhance drug delivery efficiency and precision. The theory and the science behind it have been discussed for a long time and products like Polymer nanoparticles for drug delivery have been proposed. Gene Therapy has also been proposed as a delivery medium, especially for Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs).

• Advanced Prosthetics: Research the development of prosthetics that offer enhanced mobility and sensory feedback. 3D printing allows for customizable prosthetics to be built for patient requirements and AI is also used to provide enhanced autonomy and control in prosthetic limbs, especially fingers. 

• Tissue Engineering in Organ Transplants: Investigate the feasibility of lab-grown organs as a solution to donor shortages. The waitlist for finding a suitable organ donor is increasing with every passing day and many people, and one of the solutions proposed to deal with it is lab-grown organs or organoids, which are derived from stem cells. The RESTORE trial is a joint research initiative by NHS Blood and Transplant (NHSBT) and the University of Bristol, in 2022, conducted the first-ever clinical trial of laboratory-grown red blood cells being transfused into another person. You can read more about it here. 

2. Chemical Engineering

Chemical engineering merges the principles of chemistry, biology, physics, and math to develop processes that turn raw materials into valuable products. It plays a pivotal role in numerous industries, from pharmaceuticals to petrochemicals. Working on topics in this field will familiarize you with the composition of organic and inorganic compounds, how they behave in various conditions, and their impact on our environment.

• Eco-Friendly Plastic Alternatives: Research the development and viability of biodegradable or recyclable plastic substitutes.

• Potential of Biofuels: Dive into the production, benefits, and challenges of bio-derived fuels. Algal Biofuels are said to be the next promising avenue in biofuels, and you can find more about the research here. 

• Efficient Water Purification Systems: Design and evaluate systems that ensure safe drinking water with minimal environmental impact.

• Synthesis of Novel Materials: Investigate the creation and applications of materials with unique properties.

3. General Chemistry

Chemistry is not the study of chemicals, but the study of matter. It is a vast field and can explain everything from how firecrackers work to why we get muscle cramps. While grasping some basic concepts can be a bit tricky, once you have developed a hold on basic chemical fundamentals, you can use that knowledge to make some real change to society at large!

• Advanced Chemical Storage: Analyzing different energy storage options and comparing and contrasting different technologies' chemistries, performance, lifetime, cost, geographic and resource constraints, and more. You can learn more about advanced storage solutions here. 

• Green Innovations: Investigating how startups and the private sector’s newest technologies are critical to the transition to a green future and how products are commercialized from lab to market.

• Nanotechnology: Understanding how material nano-structure can create specific properties and take advantage of "structure-property" understanding to engineer new materials. 

4. Materials Engineering/ Material Science

Materials engineering delves into the discovery and design of new materials. From renewable source materials for textiles to developing light-weight materials, with properties like fire resistance or electric conductance there are potentially limitless applications of material science and engineering. 

Combining the concepts of engineering, physics, and chemistry, a material scientist aims to solve real-world problems associated with nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology, energy, manufacturing, and other major engineering disciplines. 

• Graphene Applications: Delve into the properties of graphene and its myriad potential uses. Graphene is one of the materials that has been extensively researched because of its exceptional mechanical, electrical, and thermal properties. These properties make it an ideal candidate in many industries, including but not limited to electronics, energy storage, sensors, coatings, composites, and biomedical devices. You can read about some of these applications here. 

• Biomaterials in Medical Devices: Research the development and applications of organic materials in healthcare.

• Wear and Corrosion Resistant Materials: Investigate materials that can withstand harsh conditions, extending their lifespan.

• Smart Materials in Tech: Study materials that change properties in response to external stimuli and their potential applications.

5. Computer Science and Engineering

Computer science as a field of study does not need a special introduction. It has been one of the most popular areas of research. If you are comfortable with coding, and understanding algorithms and want to explore what all lies in the field of computer science besides coding, consider doing research in this field. 

• Social Media Analysis: Analyzing the impact of social media usage on the mental health of a certain age group is a growing concern in today’s society. You could perform an analysis by conducting surveys and interviews, and make inferences about the correlation between social media engagement and mental health indicators in that demographic. 

• Create an AI chatbot to help catch warning signs of mental health issues in students. The chatbot could engage in conversations with the students and make sure that if they’re struggling with depression or emotional distress, they get the help that they deserve and require. This project would involve using NLP, data processing, and possibly speech recognition if you want to create a project that is multi-modal and much more accessible. Detail the process of creating your chatbot and the responses to develop an interesting paper in the field of AI and mental health. 

• Explore Natural language processing (NLP) techniques: Analyze how NLP techniques can be used to extract emotional tones and opinions in tweets. This research could be used to optimize the process of parsing through content and making sure community guidelines are met.

6. Electrical Engineering

Electrical engineering delves into the study and application of electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. While research in this field has been ongoing for more than a century, there’s still a lot left to explore for scientists. Rather than studying traditional electrical circuits and models, the future in this field is to integrate electricity with the Internet of Things (IoT). 

Renewable energy generation techniques have matured recently, so working on how we can extract the most from the produced energy using innovative techniques will help improve the efficacy of products like solar cells and wind energy at large. 

• Efficiency of Solar Cell Materials: Analyze the performance and potential of various materials in solar energy conversion. Check out this article from MIT to see how researchers are increasing the efficacy of photovoltaic materials. 

• Energy-Efficient Lighting Systems: Design and evaluate lighting solutions that reduce energy consumption without compromising output.

• Wireless Power Transmission: Explore the challenges and potential of transmitting power without physical connectors.

• Integration of Renewable Energy: Study the intricacies of incorporating green energy sources into existing power grids.

7. Environmental Engineering

Environmental engineering is a field of study that promotes a broad understanding of sciences, such as chemistry, biology, soil science, and water to improve human and ecological health through impactful engineering applications. Scientists in this field are expected to provide practical solutions to real-world problems to tackle pollution and promote sustainability, using research in environmental sciences. 

Environmental engineers are working towards ensuring good air quality, controlling water pollution, and auditing wastes at contaminated sites. They also develop the means to protect the environment and ensure environmental sustainability. Their scope of work allows them to work with corporations as well as government agencies. 

• Industrial Impact on Water Quality: Assess how industries affect freshwater sources and potential purification methods.

• Innovative Wastewater Treatment: Design systems that effectively treat industrial effluents, reducing environmental harm. There are multiple challenges in wastewater treatment because there is no single type of pollutant. This website has a great collection of research papers on wastewater management. 

• Phytoremediation in Polluted Sites: Explore the use of plants in cleaning up contaminated sites.

• Air Pollution and Human Health: Investigate the direct and indirect effects of various pollutants on human health.

8. Statistics

Statistics can be defined as the science of learning from data. As a discipline, it deals with the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data, and effective communication and presentation of results, which help parties make calculated decisions. 

If you are interested in mathematics, doing research in statistics would be a great prospect. Statistics’ relevance is rising with every passing day, as apart from its application in traditional lab-based research and quantitative research, statistical models play a key role in AI and Machine Learning. 

• Explore the impact of physical activities on mental health: It has been established that your physical health impacts your mental health and vice-versa. You can choose to research how physical exercise, particularly a gym routine, impacts mental health and well-being. 

• Study how an infectious disease like COVID-19 spreads: The world underwent a lockdown after the highly destructive COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Its impact was unprecedented and exposed the government’s unpreparedness. Using epidemiological data you can study the spread of infectious diseases. 

• Biostatistics to study biomarkers for early detection of cancers: With the amount of patient data available with medical institutes, more and more researchers are looking to use this data to identify biomarkers or symptoms, which will help in the early detection of cancers using statistics. You can refer to this research project for more details. 

9. Physics

Physics has a lot of subdomains, with every one of these areas having important applications of their own. You might’ve heard about advances in the fields of classical mechanics, thermodynamics, electromagnetism, and quantum mechanics, all of which are important theories and models based on the laws of physics. 

• Cosmological mysteries and their explanations: The existence of dark matter has been established as a fact and scientists believe that 85 percent of all matter in the universe is made up of dark matter. But no one has been able to observe the same. So this is a promising research area. 

• Protein Folding Dynamics: Biophysics is an important subdomain of physics, which deals with physical interactions inside living beings. One of the research areas is how proteins function inside the cells. You can pursue research into how they align themselves to play vital roles in driving the cell’s functionality. You can uncover the relationship between protein structure and function, essential for understanding diseases and developing drugs. This research paper is a great source material for studying protein folding and dynamics.

• Quantum Computing: Quantum computing is a multidisciplinary field that utilizes aspects of computer science, physics, and mathematics alongside quantum mechanics to solve complex problems faster than on classical computers. Quantum computing uses quantum bits, or qubits, which process information very differently. This is an emerging field and makes for a great research area. You can explore how it can be used in AI and ML.

 

10. Civil Engineering and Sustainable Infrastructure

Civil engineering is one of the core engineering fields. Over the last century, we have seen many infrastructure marvels and that has been possible due to research in the field. As of now, the challenge lies in developing eco-friendly infrastructure, which is durable, and efficient and makes use of natural lighting and airflow. If you have an interest in civil engineering, you might want to pursue research in sustainable infrastructure development. 

• Recycled Materials in Construction: Assess the viability and benefits of using recycled materials in modern infrastructure. There are a lot of options of recycled materials available to choose from nowadays, and you can research to assess the pros and cons of each one. This research paper from the EPA is a good source to get started. 

• Urbanization and Stormwater Management: Understand how rapid urban growth affects natural water systems and potential mitigation strategies.

• Earthquake-Resistant Structures: Design and evaluate structures that can endure seismic activities.

• Environmental Impact of Infrastructure: Investigate the ecological footprint of large-scale construction projects and ways to minimize it.

If you’re looking to build unique projects in the field of AI/ML, consider applying to Veritas AI! 

Veritas AI was founded by Harvard graduate students, and through the programs, you get a chance to learn the fundamentals of AI and computer science while collaborating on real-world projects. You can also work 1-1 with mentors from universities like Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and more to create unique, personalized projects. In the past year, we had over 1000 students learn data science and AI with us. You can apply here!

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