Last week, two manuscripts co-authored by Simar Bajaj ‘20 were published in medical journals Nature Medicine and The Lancet. The Nature Medicine piece covered the widespread attempts to suppress voting rights and why medical professionals “champion patients’ right to vote to protect health and deracinate inequitable medical practices, building on the efforts of organizations such as Vot-ER and VoteHealth 2020.” The piece, by Bajaj and co-authors and medical doctors Alister Francois Martin and Fatima Cody Stanford, details why protecting voting rights is a health issue and therefore needs the support of health care professionals.
For The Lancet, Bajaj, Dr. Stanford and Lucy Tu published a piece on the historical and continued racism and misogyny faced by Black women medical professionals, including the outsized scrutiny and expectations placed upon them. “Black women physicians are simultaneously considered superhuman, but never enough. We suggest this double bind leads to a sense of disquietude as Black women’s identity conflicts with their success,” the authors argue. They go on to express support for measures such as implementing diversity, equity and inclusion work as a requirement for promotion.
As the Harker community reveled during the festivities of Harker Day this past weekend, alumni Cole Davis ’10, Drew Goldstein ’13 and Jessica Khojasteh ’11 became the latest inductees into the 2021 Harker Athletic Hall of Fame during a special ceremony held at the Harker Athletic Center.
Dan Molin, Harker’s athletic director, introduced each of this year’s inductees to the assembled audience of parents, friends, teachers and coaches. The first to be introduced was Davis, a three-sport athlete who competed in football and wrestling for his entire upper school career and in wrestling for two of those years. A Harker lifer, Davis was described by Molin as “tough, physical and a team player.” As a football player, he helped Harker reach its first ever playoff appearance and had a career-high 20 tackles against San Jose High. He was a formidable wrestler as well, and in his freshman year pinned a senior who reportedly went on to be a state-level competitor. In swimming, he was an All-American in his sophomore, junior and senior years and placed second in CCS in the 50- and 100-meter freestyle.
Goldstein, the next inductee, was described by Molin as “the definition of ironman. Not only did this gentleman play three sports for all four years at Harker, he played just about every position in the sports of football, basketball and baseball.” He captained the baseball team in his junior and senior years, and was captain of the football team in his senior year. Goldstein’s incredible work ethic led to the creation of the Drew Goldstein Commitment Award, which is awarded to Harker athletes who compete in three sports per year for all four of their years at the upper school.
The final inductee, Jessica Khojasteh, “was always on top of our list” of eventual inductees, Molin said. She was one of Harker’s most successful swimmers, earning four varsity letters and becoming the school’s first CCS champion in any individual or team sport after winning 2010 CCS championship in the 200-meter individual medley. She was also named to the 2011 Scholastic Championship team, was a four-time All-American, a three-time league MVP and in 2010 was named Harker’s Female Athlete of the Year. She also set no fewer than six Harker records: in the 50-, 100-, 200- and 500-meter freestyle events; the 100-meter breaststroke and 200-meter IM.
After receiving their awards, the inductees together removed the curtain to reveal the newly updated Hall of Fame display, which sits in the Harker Athletic Center.
On Friday, Daniela Lapidous ’12 visited the upper school to speak to Harker’s Green Team about her personal experiences in environmental activism, with a focus on her efforts to get her alma mater, Columbia University, to divest from funding in the fossil fuel industry.
Lapidous, who is now a deputy field director at Green New Deal Network and worked for the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, discussed how she became involved with the organization Barnard Columbia Divest (later renamed Columbia Divest for Climate Justice) after her first year at Columbia and began participating in protests, including one in Washington, D.C., attended by 10,000 people.
One of the most significant protest actions she participated in was the eight-day occupation of Columbia’s Low Library in 2016. She and other CDCJ members staged a sit-in at the library in an effort to persuade university president Lee Bollinger to make a pledge of divestment from the top 200 publicly traded fossil fuel companies. Lapidous said the occupation was supported by many students, who provided food to the occupiers and attended teach-ins on climate justice.
Earlier this year, Columbia ended direct investment in publicly traded oil and gas companies. Lapidous noted that while there are some caveats (exceptions may be made for companies with a “credible plan” to bring business to net zero emissions by 2050), the progress was heartening. She also highlighted the massive mobilization that took place over nearly a decade for the progress to happen.
Members of the Green Team sought advice from Lapidous on how to achieve their own goals. “In my own organizing, I have found that having conversations with decision makers is great,” she said. “When you come to a difference of values or priorities then it is helpful to have support from students and faculty.”
She also said that setting an example can be inspiring to others: “Even if you start small, seeing other people doing the work can inspire more people to come in.”
Earlier this month, Wajahat Ali MS ’94 appeared on the “On Being” podcast, hosted by journalist and author Krista Tippett. Ali, now a journalist and columnist for The Daily Beast, shared his views on hope as framed by his daughter’s experience beating cancer after being diagnosed at age 3. He spoke with theologian Kate Bowler, who herself was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer at the age of 35. The podcast in its entirety and a transcript are available at the “On Being” website.
It’s been a busy several days for Harker alumni athletes. Golfer Maverick McNealy ’13, pursuing his first PGA win, took second place at the Fortinet Championship over the weekend with a score of -18, just behind winner Max Homa. Current Harker golfer Allison Yang, grade 9, met McNealy before competition on Sunday. “She wished him good luck and [told him] to play Harker smart,” said Harker golf coach Ie-Chen Cheng. “Allison was stoked that Maverick took the time out to talk to her.”
Meanwhile, Emily Cheng ’20 helped MIT women’s volleyball win the MIT Invitational on Sept. 11. Also playing in that event was Ashley Jezbec ’20, who played for Bowdoin College. Cheng was named the MVP event with 47 assists and 14 digs.
In October, Harker alumni Cole Davis ‘10, Drew Goldstein ‘13 and Jessica Khojasteh ‘11 will be inducted into the Harker Athletic Hall of Fame. The three former student athletes will be honored for their athletic achievements and for their exemplary efforts in becoming global citizens. The induction ceremony will be part of the Harker Day celebration on Oct. 9, which also will include the annual Homecoming football game and the Family & Alumni Picnic. For more information, email news@harker.org. Come on out and support these incredible alumni!
Last week, Opportunity X, a nonprofit co-founded by Harker alumni, was awarded the $2,500 STEM Action Grant from the Society for Science, which organizes prestigious competitions such as the Regeneron Science Talent Search and Broadcom MASTERS.
“At Opportunity X, our mission is to bring cost-free science research opportunities to underrepresented and low-resource middle school students across the country via school enrichment programs, summer camps and science fairs,” said rising senior Alice Feng, a co-president of Opportunity X. The funds will be used to help further their efforts in bringing STEM education to underserved communities. The organization is currently staffed by 18 Harker student volunteers and seven Harker alumni as well as students from high schools around the Bay Area.
Opportunity X was founded in 2016 by Cynthia Chen ’20 and Adishree Ghatare, then a student at Saint Francis High School. Since then, the organization has held after-school programs at many area schools, including KIPP Heartwood Middle School, Morrill Middle School and River Glen School. Earlier this year, two programs were held at middle schools in Virginia. To date, the organization has held more than 850 research workshops in 18 schools. They now have branches in seven states, including Texas, Florida, Virginia and Alabama.
In 2019, Opportunity X held its first Science Fair at the Alum Rock Branch Library in San Jose, where students showcased their projects and received trophies for their work. Another Science Fair was held virtually in May of this year and included speakers from NASA, Google and Stanford University.
The STEM Action Grant program provides support to community nonprofit organizations that promotes STEM education to underrepresented communities. This year, Society for Science provided $165,000 in grants to 38 organizations across the country.
Last week, Natasha Sarin ‘07 was featured in a piece by The New York Times, which focused on her work in President Joe Biden’s administration to track down and claim the revenue owed by tax cheats (also known as the tax gap), and how it figures into the president’s infrastructure plan.
According to the story, Sarin’s appointment indicated the importance of tax code compliance in the administration. Trained at Harvard and formerly a professor of law and finance at the University of Pennsylvania, she was hired in March by Janet Yellen, U.S. secretary of the treasury, and worked with economist (and former treasury deputy secretary during the Clinton administration) Larry Summers at Harvard to devise a way to reduce the tax gap. Their research, published in 2019, stated that the tax gap could be reduced by 15 percent by empowering the Internal Revenue Service to increase audits of the wealthy and instituting more thorough reporting requirements.
The piece also touches on Sarin’s other notable collaborations, including her work with Congressman Ro Khanna, as well as her activities and achievements as a Harker student, such as captaining the varsity basketball team and her involvement in hiring rapper Snoop Dogg for an event on youth violence.
Earlier this month, the Harker Research Club hosted a panel with Vikas Bhetanabhotla ‘14, Cynthia Chen ‘20, Anastasiya Grebin ‘18 and Ruhi Sayana ‘19, who spoke about their post-high school careers and offered advice on how to find research opportunities.
The panelists each shared what they had done after graduating from Harker and how the research they conducted as Harker students helped shape their current work. At Harker, Sayana, who currently works in a lab at Stanford University studying neurodegenerative diseases, had a significant interest in pediatric oncology before becoming interested in genetics. “When I was applying to labs at Stanford, I was trying to look at something at the intersection of pediatric disease and genetics, and that’s how I ended up at the lab that I am now,” she said. “So [my work at Harker] definitely informed it.”
Bhetanabhotla, who graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 2018 and now works at Palo Alto Networks, was heavily interested in machine learning. “My research was the intersection of cosmology with machine learning, so that research experience with machine learning really guided my interests through college,” he said. This carried through to his post-college career, as machine learning is now a part of his work at Palo Alto Networks
“In high school pretty much all of my research was wet lab, and I jumped around a lot,” said Grebin. “I did some plant science. I did some data set analysis for cancer mutations.” As a sophomore, she participated in a directed evolution project that “didn’t pan out,” but she now attends CalTech, “which is the place where directed evolution was essentially invented,” and her work now incorporates directed evolution to create viral constructs.
Most of Chen’s projects at Harker were in bioinformatics, which incorporated biology and computer science. Her work in that area earned her a spot as a finalist in the 2020 Regeneron Science Talent Search. She is now attending Harvard University and works in a lab at MIT, doing research to learn how to better explain how artificial intelligence models work. “I think the projects [I worked on at Harker] gave me a good starting point for figuring out what I wanted to explore further in college,” she said.
The panelists also offered advice on how to find research opportunities in high school. “It’s all about casting a wide net,” Bhetanabhotla said. “I knew I was interested in the astronomy area a little bit but I was also interested in biology potentially so I just emailed a lot of different professors.”
Sayana agreed. “You’re in high school,” she said. “This is the time to explore as much as you can, and if you’re reaching out to labs there’s a very high chance that a lot of people won’t respond to you, so the wider out you go, the better chance you’re going to have at getting a response.”
Chen recommended the approach of emailing research labs that seemed potentially interesting or open to taking on high school students, “because I didn’t really know specifically what I wanted to do in terms of research in high school because you’re exposed to so many different subjects.”
Grebin did much of her research in high school at Harker after school. “I kind of advocate for that path for at least the first couple of years before you decide to move on to working in a lab and doing slightly more in-depth research,” she said. “Simply because you have so much more ability to pick what you want to do. I miss being able to pick the project that I want to work on as an undergraduate.”
Late last month, Misha Ivkov ‘17 received the Mark Stehlik Alumni Undergraduate Impact Scholarship from the Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science (SCS), which “recognizes and supports SCS undergraduates whose drive for excellence extends beyond the classroom,” according to the CMU SCS website. The scholarship is awarded to students as they approach the end of their undergraduate career. “Awardees have demonstrated a desire to make a difference in SCS, the field of computer science and the world around them,” a news story posted on the website states.
According to the story, Ivkov’s drive was applied not only to his own studies but to teaching other students, for which he was awarded the Alan J. Perlis Undergraduate Student Teaching Award. He has served as a teacher’s assistant in three classes and co-developed a student-taught class to help students give technical interviews.