The middle school campus was bustling with activity today as more than 3,400 Harker community members, including about 200 alumni and their families, came together for the 68th Harker Family & Alumni Picnic. This year’s theme, “Back to the Future,” celebrated Harker’s 125-year history and brought optimism for the future to the students, parents and faculty in attendance. The carnival games, food booths and attractions such as inflatable slides and laser tag remained popular, as did the annual lunchtime show, a time travel-themed production that featured performances by lower, middle and upper school performing arts groups. Here’s to the future!
Many thanks to the sponsors who helped make this event possible:
Gold Level:
All Natural Stone
Anonymous
Silver Level:
Stan and Lena Tomberg
Anonymous
Bronze Level:
Lijun Zhang and Chun Wang, V1 Group
And congratulations to this year’s raffle winners:
Harker is pleased to announce that Dr. Teja Patil ’02 is the 2018 Distinguished Alumni Award recipient.
The Distinguished Alumni Award recognizes and honors a prominent alumna or alumnus who exemplifies the very best of Harker, whose contributions have led to extraordinary advances that benefit the greater good, who gives back to his or her community and to Harker, and who inspires others by his or her professional leadership and commitment.
Patil embodies the Harker philosophy through her lifelong passion for learning, and commitment to civic responsibility in her work at the Palo Alto Veterans Administration (PAVA) and overseas. Her commitment to these tenets has created a highly individualized path in her quest, showing both compassion and leadership in her work. Harker honors her individuality, her leadership and her commitment to the human race to make the world a better place. She is truly a global citizen.
Patil was born in India, moved to the U.S. when she was 5 and began attending Harker in grade 5. Her passions at Harker were all things theater, French and biology.
In 2006, Patil earned a B.S. in biochemistry and cell biology (cum laude) from the University of California, San Diego, and also studied political science at the American University in Paris. Upon returning from France, she was not convinced that medicine was her calling. “I worried that being a physician was too narrow and would not satisfy my interest in the humanities and social sciences,” she said. Instead of medical school, she went to the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, to pursue a master’s in epidemiology and better understand the social determinants of health.
Patil was particularly interested in the interplay of genetics and environment in chronic disease. Her major works while at UM focused on the genetics of heart disease in the old order Amish as well as glaucoma in Peru. Her capstone project in Lima led to the discovery of a novel mutation in the myocilin gene, a previously unknown cause of hereditary glaucoma in indigenous populations.
Although she enjoyed public health research, the long hours of data analysis and paper writing did not feel quite right. “I knew I was making an impact but it felt very far removed. I boomeranged back to my original vision of becoming a physician. It’s ironic – I thought my ‘humanities’ side would not be adequately fed in the medical field; it turns out being a doctor, focusing on the individual patient, is what gave me the satisfaction I needed – that desire to feel more connected to the people around me.”
She received her M.D. with a concentration in global health from the University of California, San Francisco, in 2012. During that time, she spent a summer at an HIV/AIDS clinic in Mfangano, Kenya, and then went on to research the effects of malaria in pregnancy. She remained at UCSF for her internal medicine residency.
“UCSF is known as the birthplace of hospital medicine; I had so many inspirational, brilliant and kind mentors there and I learned that I did not have to be a subspecialist to be an excellent or expert physician. Working in Saipan, an island in the South Pacific with little access to subspecialty care, also cemented my decision to be a jack of all trades and remain in general internal medicine. However, I was aware that this can be a taxing occupation with high rates of burnout due to the pace and severity of illness. Therefore, I chose to combine my practice in hospital medicine with teaching, in order to build in a buffer to burnout. Having students makes it hard to lose your sense of wonder,” she said.
In 2015, Patil became an attending physician doing hospital medicine at the PAVA hospital and a clinical instructor of medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine. “Medicine is an apprenticeship model,” she noted. “Whenever I work in the hospital, I never take care of patients alone, it is always in conjunction with medical students, interns and residents.”
Her particular areas of focus at PAVA have been improving resident experience and the educational value of nighttime clinical rotations. Her current interest is how to prevent physician burnout by building self-reflective practice and emotional resilience. “I love geriatrics and end-of-life care because it is the perfect intersection of complex decision-making and building therapeutic alliance. I am so grateful to work at the VA where both my brain and my heart feel that they are challenged and growing.”
The Patil family is truly a Harker family. Brother DJ Patil has two children at Harker, Veyd, grade 7, and Samaara, grade 4, and Teja’s parents Suhas and Jayashree have been deeply involved with Harker. The Patil Theater in the new Rothschild Performing Arts Center bears their name.
Amy Jin ’18 has been named a 2018 Davidson Fellow Laureate in the technology category for her project on deep learning to help track surgical instruments using video. The application will help surgeons to improve surgical care by automatically assessing operative skill, “given that approximately half of all surgical complications are avoidable, many of which are attributed to poor individual and team performance,” according to the summary on the institute’s webpage. The summary continues: “Evaluating operative performance requires expert supervision and is a manual process that is time-consuming and subjective. Thus, Amy leveraged region-based convolutional neural networks to facilitate operative skill assessment, extracting visual assessment metrics such as tool usage timelines, motion heat maps, and tool trajectory maps. her summary notes.”
Davidson Scholarships are awarded to young scholars; each must be 18 or younger to receive the grant. Categories include science, technology, engineering, mathematics, music, literature, philosophy and Outside the Box. Projects must contribute a work recognized by experts in the field as an outstanding accomplishment that has the potential to benefit society.
The 2018 Davidson Fellows were honored at a reception in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 28. Rajiv Movva ’18 also received a Davidson Scholarship; read about his project in Harker News.
Rajiv Movva ’18 was named a Davidson Fellow by the Davidson Institute for Talent Development to develop his project “SNPpet: Deep Learning the Human Epigenome Reveals Regulatory Sequence Patterns and Genomic Mechanisms of Disease.” Only 20 students are so honored nationwide each year. Movva is off to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology this fall. Check out the great article about the honor and Movva’s plans and read his official biography on the Davidson Institute web page.
The article notes, “Movva built a computer model that can use a particular DNA sequence as input to predict gene expression level as output, which sheds light on the poorly understood ‘dark genome.’ In practice, Movva’s model could bring clinical meaning to large patient-specific DNA sequence datasets that are currently hard to decode. This advanced timeframe can allow patients to make lifestyle changes or be treated far in advance, when the disease has little potential to have severe consequence. Movva’s model can also give researchers a clearer picture of disease by flagging genes that are abnormally regulated, prioritizing better targets for drugs and other treatments that remain to be discovered.”
Davidson Scholarships are awarded to young scholars—each must be 18 or younger to receive the grant. Categories include science, technology, engineering, mathematics, music, literature, philosophy and Outside the Box. Projects must contribute a work recognized as an outstanding accomplishment by experts in the field that has the potential to benefit society.
Movva will receive a $10,000 grant to assist him with his research. The 2018 Davidson Fellows will be honored at a reception in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 28. Amy Jin ’18 also received a Davidson Fellowship; read about it in Harker News
Harker preschoolers learned about prehistoric art, then made some of their own, last week. Michael Ear, the new art teacher at the preschool, led the expedition.
“To begin the year, I wanted to talk about the earliest and oldest painting ever done by humans,” said Ear. “Saying that this was about 35,000 years ago doesn’t mean much without the context of what life was like, so I started describing how there were no cars and no homes to live in. The people lived in caves for shelter and to tell stories, they painted on the walls.
“The examples we looked at were of a pig-deer eating berries and handprints. I had the students guess what they were looking at, but the paintings were hard to see because it was so long ago. I suggested we go into a time machine to see the paintings fresh on the walls of a cave. But some of them needed reference for what a time machine is, so we saw a clip of Back to the Future and that gave them an idea of what it would be like to travel through time.
“We turned off the art studio lights, grabbed a lantern and a flashlight and traveled back in time – and we saw a cave in the corner of the room! We entered and looked for some kind of painting similar to what we saw in the present. After 30 seconds of searching with a flashlight, the kids shouted, ‘There!’ and we found a handprint and a bison. It was glowing! I asked if they also wanted to paint their handprints on the walls and they used similar glow-in-the-dark paints to do so. We left the cave and returned to the future with our new paintings from the cave to take home and make glow in the dark,” he finished. What a great outing!
Harker’s new Rothschild Performing Arts Center (RPAC) and its 450-seat Patil Theater, along with the athletic center that opened last summer, were named winners in the Silicon Valley Business Journal’s Structure Awards in the Education Project category.
The athletic center, which comprises 33,000 square feet and is a LEED Gold certified building, opened in August 2017, while the RPAC, boasting 53,000 square feet and on track for LEED Gold, opened in February 2018.
Congratulations to Alice Feng, grade 9, and Sriram Bhimaraju, grade 7, on being named finalists in this year’s Broadcom MASTERS competition! They are two of just 30 students who are headed to Washington, D.C. next month for the final stage of this national middle school STEM contest, which had a record 2,537 applicants this year. While in Washington, the top 30 — who will each receive a cash prize of $500 — will demonstrate their knowledge of STEM, as well as their acumen in critical thinking, collaboration and more in a competition for the top prize of $25,000.
Sept. 5, 2018
Five Harker students were recently named to the Top 300 in this year’s Broadcom MASTERS competition, one of the top middle school STEM competitions in the country. This year the competition, organized by the Society for Science & the Public, included more than 5,000 nominees and 2,537 applicants, each evaluated by distinguished members of the scientific community.
Harker students in the Top 300, who entered the contest during the 2017-18 school year, are Harsh Deep, Alice Feng, Shounak Ghosh, and Arely Sun, all grade 9; and Sriram Bhimaraju, grade 7. More information, including project titles, is available at the competition’s website.
Later this month, 30 of the Top 300 MASTERS will be selected as finalists to travel to Washington, D.C., in October for the final portion of the competition. Congratulations and best of luck!
Andrew Semenza ‘18 and Millie Lin ‘18, at the behest of brother Jason Lin, grade 10, performed at a benefit concert on Aug. 19 along with friend Kevin Zhu, a Bay Area native and world-renown violinist. All proceeds went to the Tahirih Justice Center, a national nonprofit committed to serving as many immigrant women and girls fleeing violence as possible.
Jason Lin was the primary organizer of the event. “After debating immigration issues at debate camp, I went to a talk by the Tahirih Justice Center about their work regarding asylum seekers, and was moved by their message,” he said. “Although the TJC has a 99 percent success rate, they can only help one in 10 clients! Like many others at the talk, I was motivated to take action. Since my friend Kevin, a fantastic violinist, was about to come over to the Bay Area, and since Andy Semenza was also available, I decided to organize a benefit concert. My friends helped me get the show on the road.”
Millie Lin also had attended the talk. “We wanted to help the organization and the people it supports, especially at a time when the family separation issue at the U.S.-Mexico border was so critical … so we partnered with the Tahirih Justice Center to organize the concert,” she said.
“Five weeks later, after Jason’s frantic daily communications with Tahirih, volunteers and performers to organize the event, the concert was wonderfully successful. We far surpassed our fundraising goal of $15,000, reaching about $31,000 from numerous small donations. In addition to organizational help from Tahirih, the majority of the effort was truly youth-led, as Jason, performers and volunteers were all around high school age,” Millie added.
Jason noted the success was a group effort. “Spreading word of the concert was a challenge,” he said. “Everyone is constantly being bombarded with news and notifications, so it was difficult to let everyone know. However, the Tahirih Justice Center helped us contact a few local news organizations, and I assembled a small team of volunteers to help advertise. About nine fellow Harker student volunteers sold tickets with me. Some went door to door, some posted notices at farmers markets or libraries, some posted on social media – and with the support of the community, seats quickly sold out.
“Seeing the entire community come together for the concert and the enthusiasm of the group of volunteers in selling tickets and ushering guests made the whole effort worth it for me. It was immensely fulfilling to see our efforts come together for the concert. Thanks to the avid support of the community, the event was a huge success! None of this would have been possible without the volunteers, the performers or the community,” said Jason.
“Personally,” said Millie, “due to the great results and warm support, this event reinvigorated my belief in our local community’s potential to reach out and help others. As a bystander to much of the organizational process, I watched the wonderful enthusiasm of Jason and his fellow volunteers and friends in putting this all together, and I’m especially hopeful for the potential for those younger than me to accomplish great and good things in the future.”
The Harker School announced this week the passing of Diana Nichols, board chair and former longtime school leader, who died Sept. 2, 2018 of pancreatic cancer. She was 76. Her obituary ran in the Monterey Herald and the Mercury News.
Marie Clifford, Nichols’ sister and fellow board member, said, “She died in her beloved Carmel home overlooking the Pacific, surrounded by nature. She died peacefully, with her son at her side, exactly where she wanted to be. In death, as in life, she did it her way.”
Nichols’ husband, Howard Nichols, head of the school for many years, passed away in 2008. “We are saddened today to lose the other half of this legendary team,” said Head of School Brian Yager in his message to the community. “However, Howard and Diana’s contributions to the development of The Harker School over a combined span of 45 years have left an indelible mark on the course of the school’s history. We will always be grateful.”
“Diana told me to tell the greater Harker community that she loved you all and that she was eternally grateful for your support in helping build an exemplary educational institution,” added Clifford. “She had many plans for Harker, but she felt it was now up to the next generation.”
Nichols’ wishes were for donations to be made to her favorite charity, The Harker School. Questions regarding donations can be directed to Joe Rosenthal at joe.rosenthal@harker.org.
A memorial to honor Diana Nichols will be held Saturday, Oct. 6 from 12-2 p.m. in the Rothschild Performing Arts Center on Harker’s upper school campus at 500 Saratoga Ave., San Jose. Please RSVP to Nicole Hall at nicole.hall@harker.org.
For those unable to attend, messages for the family, or memories that can be shared at the memorial, can be sent to communications@harker.org or mailed to 500 Saratoga Ave., San Jose, CA 95129; regular deliveries will be made to her family.
Late last month, middle school math teacher and department chair Vandana Kadam received the Edyth May Sliffe Award for Distinguished Teaching in Middle School and High School. The Mathematical Association of America presents this award to teachers who foster student interest in mathematics by competing in the yearly American Mathematics Competitions.
Candidates are nominated based on recommendation letters from colleagues, and selected for the award based on criteria such as improving AMC scores, increased student participation and increased numbers of students invited to participate in the American Invitational Mathematics Examination (AIME) and the USA Mathematics Olympiad (USAMO). Congrats to Ms. Kadam on this well-earned recognition!