hey friends it's rishab and I've been getting a ton of comments saying hey rishab can you teach me how to come up with a research idea I'm super lost I don't know how to come up with my topic my science fair idea my passion my interest how do I find that well in this video I cover all of that so stick around a brief intro about me my name is worship Jane I'm a senior at Westview High School in Portland Oregon and I'll be announcing my college commitment very very soon but anyway on to science research I've published three papers in nature scientific data BMC bioinformatics and Frontiers in oncology as a high schooler and so I think I have a fair opinion and some Fair advice for other high schoolers looking to publish research or looking to just explore their passions in this wonderful thing we have called science and so I've also had my experiences in conferences as well as you know science competitions and research competitions for high schoolers like regeneron isaf broadcom Masters um Junior science and Humanity Symposium and I have won the top honors at all those competitions and so I truly feel like I have the perspective and the knowledge and uh the experiences to guide you on this so that being said my channel is really all about this kind of stem areas if you're a highly motivated student and any of this sounds kind of appealing do be sure to subscribe so you don't miss out on future videos and I have a ton of other videos I have a full playlist about science research so be sure to check that out after this video but today we're going to be covering first an introduction to this idea of scientific research how to come up with the idea and that passion then I'm going to be walking you through the process step by step I'm finally going to be giving you some examples and free resources for executing this and how you can really incorporate that process into coming up with your passion and your idea and then finally this is some bonus info in section four of this video I'm I'm going to be going over some science fairs research competitions Publications and how to actually execute like the full research procedure and how to get to that final stages um and so that being said one really really quick important thing um this video is not for everyone this is truly for people who want to do science research this isn't something that just you know one day you'll complete a project in one day and somehow you know you'll you'll publish a research paper based off of that this is truly an iterative process that takes a lot of learning a lot of experimentation and so you know really really only watch this video if you have the time to go through every single detail if you're going to be skipping around please you know click off this video and come back some other time this is truly for dedicated detailed people who want to watch each and every second of this video to find out you know this tool this whole process and I truly feel like I can take this idea that's in my brain and and planted in yours and let it develop and plant that seed in you to grow a tree if you watch this full video and so that being said first just some quick advice you know in this in this highly competitive thing you know a lot of people who compete in science fairs and science research competitions in high school you'll see stuff like you know AI carbon nanotubes crypto drones Alzheimer's disease all these huge big topics which are often really really exciting but today I'm going to tell you to focus on your passion and I'm going to teach you how to find what you're interested in it could be one of these things you know but you don't have to say like hey I'm interested in uh biochemistry but I have to incorporate AI I have to bring in blockchain into this project you genuinely don't right you'll just see that oftentimes these are really popular projects because they're popular fields to work in but last year I won the regeneron international science and engineering Fair on a problem that is decades old and is not super popular I won you know one of the biggest awards that a high schooler can win using a project that doesn't necessarily have a lot of these random buzzwords in it and so I truly like you to you know kind of toss out some of that preconceived notion that I think a lot of high schoolers and competitive students might have and and truly work with me on this so that that being said in section 2 of this video let's talk about the whole process of this thing right first we're going to talk about how you can find what you're interested in then I'm going to go into a literature dive how do you dive in and extract the information you need and third I'm going to talk about how you actually select that question that might become your project your research publication your idea so this is super exciting section 2.1 your interest how do we even find what you're intrigued in I'm in ninth grade let's say I'm an eighth grader how do I even find what I'm interested in I don't know yet I just like to play basketball and I'm someone interested in science but I don't know exactly what I want to research in that's a valid experience a bunch of people have that question and have been dming me on Instagram and all this stuff so here's my advice first I want you to begin consuming content you probably already do this right if you watch YouTubers like the kurz gazoget I don't know how to pronounce that I'm sorry um or podcasters like like Lex Friedman um you know there's there's tons of good content out there I want you to truly seek out high quality stuff of course there's a lot of good content you know we live in this age of information and so we're super fortunate to have all this knowledge surrounding us at all times and so I want you to begin consuming content from books videos lectures and blogs I have some examples here like there's Google's blog over here um I have a this thing with this lecture thing the reason why I have that is because in my sophomore year of high school from YouTube I completed Stanford's full NLP course it had like 30 videos or something each hours long and it was so interesting but the best part it was completely available online for free for anyone and so there's so much information out there and so I truly encourage you to start consuming some of that content it doesn't have to be a super in-depth thing it can be a base level course just to start learning some skills gaining some knowledge and once you start consuming this content um you're naturally going to have some thoughts about it you're naturally going to learn some things and so I want you to start taking notes you know get grab a journal buy a journal buy a diary or something and start writing in it every day from whatever content you're consuming let's say you're consuming some YouTube video about some biochemistry topic right write down some notes just write some minor details about it once you release the writing is so so important in this because it is what catalyzes you to come up with your own questions because you actually start to trigger those gears in your brain to start rotating and generating those ideas within you and the third piece of this is to find what you gravitate towards so let's touch on one quick thing you may be overwhelmed right you're going to be like hey I'm watching like a hundred science videos a day okay maybe not 100 but I'm consuming five articles 10 videos a day I have so many topics I have crypto I have I don't know like drones AI those are just some random buzzwords of course but you have so many of these topics you should have many of these topics this is the very beginning right you don't want to limit yourself down to one field specifically you want to explore because oftentimes passions can change interests can shift and so you want to explore as much as you can until you can converge onto one idea so please don't restrict yourself at the beginning now dive into the rabbit hole so Wikipedia is an excellent source to do this so once you start consuming some content on YouTube let's say you hear about the super ant colonies on the in a nutshell channel right and uh on that channel they talk about this Mega colony of ants and you love insects right you're super interested in that you want to study it on your own but how do you move on to their dive into the rabbit hole so afterwards after watching that excellent video you take some notes and then you revisit it and you're like this was super interesting let me read a little bit more about it use Wikipedia why Wikipedia you've heard from your teachers Wikipedia is trash don't use it Wikipedia is actually really interesting because it has hundreds of hyperlinks and references on every single page a requirement for Wikipedia is that people add secondary sources and tertiary sources onto their web pages the pages they make on Wikipedia because of that you're going to get access to tons of Articles and tons of resources just on every page that you visit it's honestly quite incredible the power of this this huge website that is Wikipedia okay that brings us to section 2.2 the literature dive of course Wikipedia is not the best source in the world so you're going to encounter topics you're going to encounter words from those blogs from the notes that you're now taking from the Wikipedia articles that you're now diving into that you have no idea what they mean to answer those dive deeper on Wikipedia or Google them or chat GPT just type a question what is blank it'll give you a well-informed answer and so if these things start to seem interesting dive deeper in them read another scientific article about them a lot of high schoolers contact me saying you know I went on to elseevier.com or whatever and I'm trying to read this article but it's paywalled how do I do it there are a lot of resources that are actually free one of these is called SCI Hub and so basically it allows you to kind of read articles um and it the idea is to remove all barriers in the way of Science and so essentially their goal is to make all paywalled articles available to people who want to use them and so for high school students it's a pretty cool resource I don't personally use it because I have institutional access with an affiliation at you know some universities and so I can just log into my University account but this is pretty cool for middle school high school students who want to start reading scientific literature and at the end of the day take notes on every single piece of this okay so now this is an abstract concept I've developed it's called gravitation and so basically you'll have all these notes imagine you have this journal with or let's say you filled up around 20 Pages now that's pretty reasonable right so you have a bunch of different topics you have some keywords you have some notes some new understanding from various things and you're like okay none of this is organized how do I figure any of this that's good because it's all kind of in your brain and you're going to start to gravitate towards certain things I know you may not believe it right now but once you actually do this you will naturally start to gravitate towards some things over others because you're you know you're not one years old you've had some time on this Earth to know what you kind of like right and so you're naturally going to whether you know it or not you're going to start to gravitate towards certain topics and you're going to want to dive deeper into those so keep diving deeper into that topic so you might have five topics dive deep into each of those start to gravitate towards one or two subfields dive deeper into those and then just search up like Okay so this field that I've came across I keep reading articles about it super interesting brain computer interfaces neural networks it's called computational Neuroscience Now read a review article on the state of computational Neuroscience then dive into some of those specific things once you do this enough this is like kind of a process of a literature review because you gain a lot of knowledge about this unfortunately you don't have it on undergraduate degree or a grad degree where you've studied this stuff so you need to start by understanding it and reading about these fields and so once you have that you can finally start to work towards selecting a question which is section 2.3 so I have a gear and a question mark the gear is for engineering the question mark is for scientific inquiry these are two main broad types of scientific research that can be done so the gear engineering is kind of what you would expect you're engineering a solution to a problem some problem that everyone encounters that hey I don't have enough lights in my YouTube videos how do I add more lighting oh I'm going to engineer a solution to add a light bulb okay that's like super very simple but and that's obviously something that's already been done somebody already made a light bulb but the same thing can be said about scientific inquiry but totally different you're trying to answer a question right so let's say why are my YouTube videos dark because I don't have light bulbs so let me test out different types of light bulbs and figure out which light bulb is the best that's scientific inquiry that you know you might be working towards a solution one day but right now you're just trying to answer a question which la which light bulb is the best so that's kind of the split difference and I want you to try to figure out which one based off of your your ideas and the questions that naturally arise through reading these articles that you're kind of getting into and based off of this you'll now have some ideas I know watching this video right now you're probably like how do you just get straight to ideas once you really have 20 30 pages filled in your notebook you're going to have ideas okay and so with those ideas you can start to generate some pros and cons and some of these ideas may not even be fully fledged out right it's not going to be like um my thing like improving code on optimization with recurrent neural networks right that's the final product you might just have this thing like I want to work on somehow improving the effectiveness of codon optimization and so I want to engineer some type of solution for this but I have no idea what that is but now you have this rough like idea that's been generated and you can start to generate create some pros and cons so if you're competing in a science competition which is something that a lot of high schoolers do who want to get feedback I'd highly recommend competitions actually because I feel like it truly does bring out some competitive Spirit to encourage you and motivate you to work harder and and learn more at the end of the day and and have a lot of fun as well so if you're interested in those types of science competitions as well you're going to include that as a criteria that hey do I have enough time is this doable do I have the resources how much would this cost those are some pros and cons you can start listing for each of your ideas and that will help you slowly start to shift towards one okay so this is kind of the rough process and it's a little bit confusing and so to break it down truly I wanted to dedicate a section to examples and and free resources through those examples showing you exactly what you can do so in section three here I'm going to visit two projects so a rough overview um on my very very first scientific research project in sixth grade biology class I learned about the body systems and especially I focused on the exocrine system that was mine for the human body Choice uh project or whatever and I learned more about the pancreas in seventh grade I visited a lab that specialized in pancreatic cancer and had some personal ties to pancreatic cancer and so I began to look into it a little bit more I had some a base knowledge that was developed in sixth grade biology and I had some experiences surrounding it and so I said hey let me start to dive into this idea a little bit or not an idea this this topic a little bit more and so from this topic I did the literature dive I consumed a lot of content and so I started to read other studies about pancreatic cancer I um you know looked into what are the types of things that are currently being done for this disease and I found out there's this new technology called Ai and it's being applied to it in some ways for cancer detection it's potentially solving some cool problems in this disease well guess what sixth seventh grade worship Jane was really interested in AI actually I had an Amazon Alexa and that was super cool I could see how to program it and as you can see over here these are literally repositories from my GitHub they're private now but way back from like 2016 2017 I was like literally looking into this some of this stuff tensorflow machine learning for osteoarthritis so I started to play around in Ai and I started to read some stuff in in pancreatic cancer so naturally then I went back to the literature dive that like okay AI plus pancreatic cancer what's going on over here and so I would search it in whatever thing you can of course use SCI Hub that's an excellent resource search it in Google ask chatgpt what are the current advancements in AI plus pancreatic cancer and start to read articles literature dive take a bunch of notes I filled up an entire notebook that year with just notes okay so that's how I came up with my idea eventually I dive deeper deeper into it I got onto radiotherapy and I came up with a solution that used artificial intelligence to improve radiotherapy for pancreatic cancer and now let me talk into something a little bit more in detail this is a more recent experience so I have a lot more to contribute to this example and so this project I actually conducted was at the research Science Institute this is a summer program hosted by Emmy MIT and c-e-e um and so this was actually in a lab setting as well which I think some of you might be able to relate to if you're considering getting a lab internship or research opportunity there by the way I have an entire video about RSI I have an entire video about how to score well in summer programs like how to get into those summer programs how to get research opportunities and internships like how to cold email get started with a professor in the lab and stuff like that so once again be sure to check out those other videos but this is literally extracts from my notes right the pancreatic cancer one it's in like a journal somewhere and so I didn't want to have to take photos of everything but for this project I I did stuff in a Google doc and so I literally was able to take some screenshots and put them up on the screen for you so as you can see um it says rishab interested in biological ml brain tumor modeling web development background in ml and DL for biology uh so I eventually proposed This research plan for building an AI tool for brain tumor modeling and some skills that I have python Matlab JavaScript intermediate and need to learn XYZ things okay so based off of this I was able to to come up with a research project but this is just showing you some some stuff and in the bottom left corner you can see my uh my browsers bookmarks and as you can see there's some articles bookmarked there's an entire Dropbox with like 20 research papers so it shows you that I went through the literature review [Music] um so as you can see I conducted an extensive literature review to come up with my idea and understand criteria and problems in this field so I read a bunch of papers about the state of brain tumors like glioblastoma multiform what is being done to model those tumors what is being done to treat those tumors and I came up with a bunch of different you know problems in these areas some criteria for what what criteria could be good for evaluating the solution to those problems and I began to formulate this thing that hey can I build something that solves the current challenges in brain tumor modeling so with that I then work to propose my idea this once again was in a lab setting so I actually had to propose and get feedback and get like hey you can work on this and so uh as you can see there's like some interesting proposals that were done on different approaches um and options and then I came up with an actual presentation like I had to pitch my idea um and so I had this idea that hey you can take a a MRI scan of a patient's 3D scan encode it then append these different variables that I read about from the literature review from those papers decode it and end up predicting some sort of thing which was an output tumor volume um and so based off of this I now had this idea but like how how do I do this I say in code and decode how do you encode and decode well one of the solutions to that is using my skills in AI which I previously Acquired and so I started to learn additional skills that I needed I needed to learn about neural ordinary differential equations or nodes and so Odes as you can see I have a bunch of notes about Odes I read um and I I took notes on videos like the nips conference um and a ton of just really really interesting stuff here so a ton of notes here and as you can see on the right side here there's some math that I had to learn and again I was just really taking notes through this entire process and I think that's something a lot of people don't really look at you know they they just start with the idea like okay I need to come up with an idea what idea do I do no start before start reading consuming content once you have some notes in your notebook about different fields different topics different Hot Topics you read about or heard about then you do literature dives into those read on Wikipedia scientific articles then narrow down more more scientific articles more scientific articles more scientific articles you start to come up naturally once you've done that with ideas and questions that want you want to be answered decide if it's inquiry decide if it's engineering and then start to learn the skills hey I need to solve this or hey I need to conduct this experiment for inquiry what are the skills I need to do this you read more you consume more in order to answer those questions and come up with those skills and so as you can see here are some of the resources that I use literally a YouTube video on what is a neural ordinary differential equation it's as simple as that and I took notes um I drew diagrams all of this cool stuff in order to come up with um this like the answer to those skills that I needed okay so that's an example of walking through how I came up with my idea um I ended up choosing to develop an artificial intelligence model to predict brain tumor growth in the future in order to better inform radiotherapy and chemotherapy and you know this didn't just pop off off the top of my head it came through Reading 30 papers in this field very very specific and each of those words I didn't understand I Googled them and I learned about them and I took so many notes in order to understand that and then to develop the solution that's what we're going to be talking about now in section four of the video science fairs research competitions Publications and doing the research so the order of courses first we have to do the research then I'd recommend competing if you're a high schooler because there's tons of a really great opportunities for high schoolers to get feedback on their research and then try to publish or share the findings you have with the greater scientific a community so that others can learn and advance from your work so to do the research I actually have two videos made for this one is how to get research opportunities and internships if you're looking to apply to a program or get hooked up with a lab or a professor another thing is how to get research published the video is titled how to get research published but it's I really go into step by step how to do research so beyond the literature review what are the tools I'd recommend to do the research what are the skills and programming languages you can start to learn like stuff like that um also competitions and feedback so I have an entire video made about stem programs and competitions I also have a Google doc with literally 35 research opportunities and programs for high school students the doc is completely free anyone can view it and so check that out in the pinned comment and description guys I have tons of resources I just want to make sure everyone's aware of that I also have a course then later once you've completed your research and all of that on how to make a winning science fair project just because I have a lot of experience with that in high school and middle school and then finally again how to publish I address which journals can you apply to how to pre-print your work all that interesting stuff so I hope this answered your questions um if it did please consider subscribing because I'm sure you'll find other videos helpful in the future if it didn't visit my Discord server or leave a comment down below and now watch this playlist that will take you to the rest of the very informative videos on this series