Maternal Mortality and How Race Plays a Part

Mothers of color within the United States are at an obvious disadvantage - their health care often cannot cover what they need to survive and there is and racial bias can sometimes play a part in their treatment. We want to mitigate this bias by adding racial bias training in hospitals. There are common instances of unconscious racial bias within hospitals, some believing that people of color have a higher pain tolerance than others and therefore are not open to as many medical options as others. This training will provide more fair treatment for mothers, and reduce the high mortality of African American mothers within the U.S. Our activism project is a joint event with our school’s Black Student Union in order to raise awareness to the high maternal mortality rates of African Americans

Estimating the Number of Earth-Sized Habitable Planets in our Galaxy

NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope was designed to determine the frequency of Earth-sized planets orbiting sun-like stars, and while the number of these planets detected by Kepler is already known, the efficiency and accuracy of the telescope’s instruments are not extremely clear or precise. Using planetary transits accessed from Kepler lightcurve data, one can apply machine-learning methods for detecting transits and then run simulated transits through the model to find planets that failed to be spotted previously. Here, we utilize the Box Least Squares Method (BLS) alongside the Transit Least Squares Method (TLS) to search for transit-like features while taking into account features such as stellar limb darkening, orbital radii, transit depths, and planetary ingress and egress. Once the transits are detected, we can then calculate the efficiency of the telescope using the simulated transits, and this probability can be used in proportion to the number of Earth-sized habitable exoplanets in the Milky Way Galaxy