Bridging Horizons
innovation, Identity and Global Futures
Volume 1, Issue 3 — March 2026
Published July 2026
ISSN: 3069-8200
The Princeton Journal of Interdisciplinary Research (PJIR) proudly presents Volume 1, Issue 3 (2025), Bridging Horizons: Innovation, Identity, and Global Futures — the third installment of our inaugural publishing year.
Building upon the foundations of Voices in Convergence and Frontiers of Inquiry, this issue deepens PJIR’s commitment to rigorous, cross-disciplinary scholarship that confronts both emerging and enduring global questions. The research featured in this edition traverses scientific innovation and technological transformation; re-examinations of social, cultural, and political identities; ethical dimensions of public policy and governance; and evolving intersections between health, economics, and global development.
Two Best Paper selections exemplify this breadth: "Deepfakes On Trial: A Mixed-Methods Study of Student Perceptions and Regulatory Concerns about Non-Consensual Deepfakes at the London School of Economics and Political Science," which interrogates the ethical and regulatory implications of emerging synthetic media technologies. Meanwhile, "Interpretable Transfer Learning with EfficientNetB0 for Automated Detection of Rare Anemia Morphologies in Peripheral Blood Smears" demonstrates how advances in machine learning and biomedical imaging can be translated into clinically meaningful diagnostic tools, highlighting the growing convergence of computational innovation and medical practice.
Alongside the two Best Paper selections, this volume features contributions addressing religion and social meaning, structural inequality, developments in the life sciences, and more. We hope these studies encourage readers to draw connections across fields and to approach complex contemporary questions with intellectual openness.
All accepted articles are published online under ISSN 3069-8200.
Editor’s Note
Serious scholarship often begins with a single, well-defined question. Yet the moment we follow that question far enough, we find it rarely stays in one place. Questions about attention become questions about education and equity. Questions about algorithms become questions about trust and accountability. Questions about biological systems quickly intersect with questions about human experience. This issue brings together work that reflects precisely this movement across boundaries.
In this volume, we are proud to feature research on ADHD, the effects of racial bias in dermatology datasets on convolutional neural networks, the emerging legal terrain of deepfakes, sustainable building materials, structural inequality, developments in the life sciences, and more. The issue also includes work engaging questions of religion and belief, examining gender and social identity, and exploring problems in linguistics, and more.
We celebrate interdisciplinary scholarship not as a slogan, but as a practice. The work collected here demonstrates careful technical reasoning alongside ethical awareness and social sensitivity. It shows that strong research does not dilute disciplinary rigor; rather, it is often strengthened when scholars remain attentive to the wider implications of their methods and findings.
PJIR Editorial Team
Articles in This Issue
A Comparative Study on Cognitive Bias in Large Language Models
Author: Siddharth Sreekanth, Ali Mahmoodi
Affiliation: Nikola Tesla STEM High School
Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing and artificial intelligence by enabling machines to understand and generate human-like text. However, these models are not immune to cognitive biases, which can be inadvertently acquired during the training process. This paper explores the sources and implications of cognitive bias in LLMs...
Keywords: Machine Learning, Large Language Models, Cognitive Biases
Practical Tests of Quantumness Using Multipartite Bell-Type Inequalities
Author: Aditya Jithesh
Affiliation: St Christopher’s School Bahrain
Abstract:
As time has progressed, quantum processing units (QPUs) have become increasingly accessible, offering anyone the opportunity to run programs on real quantum hardware. However, the extent to which current QPUs demonstrate genuine quantum behavior still remains a vital question to address- after all it is important to know if real quantum computers are using quantum mechanics and not just expensive classical machines...
Keywords: quantum computing, Bell inequalities, quantum tests, quantum benchmarking
A Vision Transformer Model for Detecting Obfuscated Malicious Narratives in Multiple Languages
Author: Ivan Turan
Affiliation: West High School, 241 N 300 W, Salt Lake City, UT 84103
Abstract:
Large Language Models have advanced machine intelligence, but the obfuscated text can still cause misinterpretation and reduce output accuracy. Detecting such encoded malicious text, especially in multilingual cases, remains a key challenge in online abuse prevention. In this experiment, a multilingual BERT model and a vision transformer were fine-tuned to detect multilingual obfuscated abusive text, and their effectiveness was compared across the same range of inputs...
Keywords: Obfuscated Text, Vision Transformers, Multilingual BERT, Cross-Entropy Loss, Multimodal Learning
Exploring the Relationship Between Dominant Variant Emergence and Sequence Divergence Throughout the Sars-COV2 (COVID-19) Pandemic
Author: Varin Nallabothula
Affiliation: Redmond High School, 10735 Elliston Way NE, Redmond, Washington 98053, USA
Abstract:
Viruses have a unique evolutionary landscape as they compete with one another and jump to different hosts. This is an understudied area of research, but due to the ongoing pandemic and the widely available sequence data there are new possibilities for understanding how viral genome evolution occurs...
Keywords: SARS-CoV-2; COVID-19; Genomic surveillance; Viral evolution; Sequence divergence; Dominant variants; Mutation rate; Phylogenetic analysis; Genetic variability; RNA virus
Citation for This Issue
Princeton Journal of Interdisciplinary Research. (2026). Volume 1, Issue 3 — Bridging Horizons. PJIR.
https://www.princeton-press.com/pjir/issues/vol-1-issue-3
Open Access Statement
This journal is fully open access. All articles are freely available to read, download, and share without subscription or access barriers. We encourage scholars to cite and engage with the research published here, as such scholarly exchange plays an important role in supporting emerging and early-career researchers and advancing ongoing academic conversations.