Stepping Stones · RISE Research
Student research, published under your student's own name.
RISE Research pairs high school students with academic mentors to produce one piece of original research over ten weeks. Below is a selection of what those students actually wrote, drawn from RISE's published collection.
What a research project does
Four things an application cannot claim without evidence.
Intellectual direction
A stated major reads differently when a student has already spent ten weeks inside the field and can say what they found.
Evidence of rigor
A finished paper is a fixed artifact. It survives scrutiny in a way that a list of clubs and hours does not.
Material to write from
Essays and interviews get easier when your student has something specific and their own to talk about.
A relationship with a mentor
Ten weeks of one-on-one work with an academic who knows the field, and who has read your student's thinking closely.
Projects
A selection of RISE student projects.
Forty papers across eight fields. Search by keyword or narrow to a discipline. Titles are shown as the students wrote them; names and schools are deliberately left out.
Showing 40 of 40 projects
Economics · Computer Science
From Rule-Based to Self-Improving Agents: The Evolution of AI Price Collusion
Development Economics · Gender Studies
Impact of Microfinance and Self-Help Groups on the Financial Stability and Economic Outcomes of Low-Income Women in India
Economics · Labor Economics
Causal Impact of State-Level Minimum Wage Increases Between 2015 and 2024 on Employment Rates for Teenagers Aged 16 to 19 in the United States
Economics · Public Policy · Business Studies
Tax Reform and Household Welfare: The Impact of GST 2.0 on India's FMCG Sector
Business Management
Apple versus Nokia: A Comparative Analysis of Strategic Success and Failure in the Smartphone Industry, 2007 to 2016
Cognitive Science · Experimental Psychology · Memory Research
Do Emotion Words Create More False Memories than Neutral Words?
Sociology · Gender Studies
Emotion Regulation and Academic Stress in Adolescents: The Role of Cognitive Reappraisal and Expressive Suppression
Music · Psychology
The Effects of Improvisational Music Therapy on Social Communication and Emotional Expression in Autistic Children
Student Engagement · Cooperative Learning Design
Playing the Hand You're Dealt: The Philosophy of Luck in Education
Developmental & Cultural Psychology · Migration
Immigrant Children, Development, and Sense of Belonging
Computer Science · Robotics
AERIS: An Adaptive, Battery-Aware Edge-AI Framework for Real-Time Survivor Detection in Search-and-Rescue Drones
Mechanical & Electrical Engineering
Challenges and Potential Solutions in Solid-State Lithium Metal Anode Batteries for Electric Vehicles
Mechanical Engineering · Environmental Engineering
Modeling Regenerative Braking Efficiency in Urban Electric Vehicles as a Function of Initial Braking Speed and Average Deceleration
Civil Engineering · Artificial Intelligence
Divergent Hydration Kinetics: A Type-Aware Artificial Intelligence Framework for Compressive Strength Prediction in Concrete Composites
Aerodynamics · Control Systems
Yaw Control in Fixed-Wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
Computer Science · Machine Learning
Why Feature Scaling Works: Condition Number as the Key to Gradient Descent Convergence
Computer Science · Atmospheric Science
Predicting Extreme Weather: A Theoretical Semi-Supervised Machine Learning Framework
Computer Science · Data Science · Astrophysics
How Do Convolutional Neural Networks Compare to Transformer-Based Models in Classifying Galaxy Morphologies in Large-Scale Sky Surveys?
Machine Learning · Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning for Early-Stage Parkinson's Detection in North America: A Comparative Evaluation of Logistic Regression and Random Forest Models
Artificial Intelligence · Convolutional Neural Networks
Using Data Augmentation to Improve the Robustness of Image Classification Models to Common Perturbations
Political Science · Human Rights Studies
Hierarchies of Victimhood in the Syrian Civil War: Who Gets Seen, Helped, and Believed?
Political Science · African Studies · Foreign Policy
Divergent Paths: Military Coups and Policy Outcomes in West Africa
International Relations · Political Science
United States and Chinese Foreign Aid to the Philippines: Influence on Philippine Policy on the South China Sea
Linguistics · Disability Studies
Recognition Without Reception: Deaf Voters and Pakistan Sign Language
Aerospace Policy · International Relations
Examining the Benefits and Challenges of International Cooperation for Space Exploration
Oncology · Biliary Tract Medicine
Emerging Clinical Strategies in Cholangiocarcinoma: A Review of Targeted Therapy and Immunotherapy
Biology · Neuroscience
Targeting Neurobiological Mechanisms in Parkinson's Disease: Implications for Current and Emerging Therapies
Biochemistry · Endocrinology
Curcumin-Mediated Regulation of the IKK/NF-κB Inflammatory Pathway in Diabetes Mellitus: Mechanisms and Therapeutic Implications
Neuroscience · Psychology
Evaluating the Importance of Sleep in Adolescents and Its Effect on Dopamine Regulation
Science · Biology
Evaluating Imaging-Based Techniques for Diagnosis and Analysis of Lung Adenocarcinoma
Plant Ecology · Biogeochemistry
Investigation of Leaf Investment Strategies and Nutrient Cycling Among Endemic Hawaiian Plants Across the Archipelago's Soil Chronosequence
Economics · Environmental Policy
Do Government Climate Policies Hinder Short-Term Economic Growth or Stimulate Long-Term Innovation and Industrial Competitiveness?
Aerospace Engineering · Environmental Science · Data Modeling
Regression-Based Modeling of Flight Emissions and Per-Passenger Climate Impact
Environmental Biology
Ecological and Range Traits of Invasive and Non-Invasive Myna Species, and What They Suggest About Future Diversity
Environment · Sustainability · Economics
Examining the Success and Price of Carbon Credits in the Livestock Sector in India
Cyclotron Physics · Proton Beam Therapy · Monte Carlo Simulation
From Cyclotrons to Cancer Therapy: A Physics-Based Simulation of Proton Beam Interactions in Human Tissue
Physics · Nonlinear Dynamics
Quantitative Analysis of Basin-Boundary Complexity in Multi-Attractor Magnetic Pendulum Systems
Astrophysics · General Relativity · Computational Physics
How Gravitational Time Dilation Affects the Flow of Time on Different Astrophysical Entities: Exoplanets, Stars, and Compact Objects
Quantum Mechanics · Nuclear Physics · Plasma Physics
Screening Effects on the Tunneling Probability for Deuterium-Tritium Fusion Using the WKB Approximation
Chemistry · Materials Science
Molecular Design of Amphiphilic Block Copolymers: Structure and Function Relationships in Micellar Drug Delivery Systems
Titles are drawn from the student project collection published by RISE Research at riseglobaleducation.com. Student names and schools are omitted. The full collection is larger than the selection shown here.
How a family joins
Four steps, and the first one is with us.
Strategy call with Stepping Stones
Forty-five minutes, no cost. We look at your student's year, workload, and interests, and say plainly whether research is the right use of this particular season.
Research application
If it fits, your student completes RISE's application, describing the question they want to pursue and the field it sits in.
Profile review and mentor match
RISE reviews the profile and matches your student with a mentor whose own work is close to the question.
Onboarding and the ten weeks
The cohort begins. We stay alongside it, so the paper connects to the rest of the application rather than sitting apart from it.
Where we come in
Research is a tool, not a strategy.
A research paper helps a student who has a direction and needs evidence for it. It does much less for a student who is still deciding what they care about, and it can crowd out work that would matter more in a junior spring. That judgment is the part we own.
Before any family joins RISE through us, we do the same thing we do with every other decision on the list:
- Work out whether this year has room for ten weeks of sustained work.
- Decide whether the question your student wants to ask connects to the story the application is already telling.
- Say so directly when the answer is no, and name what we would do instead.
- Keep the paper tied to the essays, the course plan, and the college list once it is finished.
We route every family to a conversation with us first. That is the whole point of the partnership.
Next step
Let's find out whether this is your student's year for it.
Bring the transcript, the activities, and the question your student keeps coming back to. We will tell you what we actually think.
Book Your Free 45-Minute Strategy Call→Partnership disclosure. Stepping Stones College Educational Advisors is a referral partner of RISE Research and RISE Global Education. RISE is the program provider; we are not. Stepping Stones does not mark up RISE tuition, and families pay RISE directly. We recommend the program only where we believe it serves the student.
Project titles on this page are published by RISE Research and are the work of its students. They appear here as examples of the program's output; student names and schools have been omitted.
Every Step Leads to Accepted™