http://www.dynodon.org/mumc/
Brooke Muonio
Faculty Adviser: Dr. Khairul Islam
Title: Does Cancer Discriminate?
Abstract: Lung cancer is the leading cause of death in the United States. The question could be asked: Does cancer discriminate? To answer this question, we would like to do a trend analysis of malignant lung cancer over time by year of diagnosis and gender. Our analysis suggests that males have higher rates of cancer incidence over time than do females. We intend to fit models to these trends to see which type of model can best explain the progression of this phenomenon. This work provides an opportunity to apply the optimization skills learned in Calculus Class in fitting models to real-life data. We first examined the incidence using the Surveillance Epidemiology and End Results (SEER) data by SEER*Stat software and then fitted appropriate models using Excel.
Shannon Colleen Bourke
Faculty Adviser: Dr. Andrew Ross
Title: Nonlinear Curve Fitting (Linear Plus Exponential) for Magnetic Cooling Data
Abstract: Instruments sent into space must be cooled to temperatures lower than 50 milliKelvin to decrease noise and increase sensitivity. One way we cool the instruments is through the use of an adiabatic demagnetization refrigerator. To determine the best magnetic coolant we must measure the magnetic coolant's thermal resistance and heat capacitance. We do this by fitting curves to data taken during cooling experiments. We explore a model that uses an exponential plus linear fit. We use our model to predict data points and compare them to the actual data taken during the experiments, as well as explore the fitting properties with artificial data.
