On Nov. 28, Simar Bajaj ’20 received the Foreign Press Association’s Science Story of the Year award, for a piece he penned for The Guardian in August about pig-to-human heart transplants. Bajaj, who currently attends Harvard University, went to London to receive the award in person. A video has been posted of Bajaj receiving the award, as well as some of his remarks. The FPA is the world’s oldest press organization, dating back to 1888. Bajaj is the youngest awardee in the organization’s history.
Bajaj became interested in science journalism after taking creative writing classes at Harvard, and to date has contributed 24 pieces for various outlets, including Time, WIRED and Scientific American. More of Bajaj’s journalistic work and other writings can be found at his website.
In early January, the Class of 2020 gathered at the Hayes Mansion in San Jose for a special celebration that brought together hundreds of alumni and their loved ones to reflect on and honor their time as Harker students.
Safety concerns caused by the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in the cancellation of the 2020 graduation exercises, a heartbreaking end to a tumultuous year.
“It’s fun to see everyone again,” said 2020 graduate Anthony Shing. “I was bummed out that we didn’t have graduation and I’m happy that we were able to meet again. It was a great event.”
During the event, attendees viewed each graduate’s class collages, watched a special recap video of their years at Harker and heard speeches by their classmates. “It felt like I was still in high school. It was nice seeing everyone,” said Simren Gupta ’20.
The event was also a chance for the families of the graduates to celebrate and reminisce. “The Class of 2020 deserved such a nice sendoff, even one-and-a-half years later,” said Julie Buckly, mother of 2020 graduate Jeffrey Fung. “I think the students truly enjoyed seeing each other and it was fun to reconnect with parents as well.”
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.
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.
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.”
Last weekend, upper school economics teacher Sam Lepler caught up with several Harker alumni during a trip to Philadelphia. While visiting family in Pennsylvania, Lepler put out a call to alumni in the area to see if they would like to meet. Within hours, he was sitting down to dinner with Megan Cardosi ’18, David Feng ’20, Ria Ghandi ’17, Rashmi Iyer ’20, Kelly Shen ’19, Kevin Xu ’18 and Shaya Zarkesh ’18. “I just stepped out for a bit and they all came to meet,” said Lepler. “It was super fun seeing them all.”
The group chatted about life at the University of Pennsylvania and how it has changed a year into the COVID-19 pandemic. “They told me that it’s awesome to be on campus from January – last semester was fully remote – and that even though the classes remain virtual, they are enjoying life in the dorms or off-campus housing, joining the ski club, and diving into life at Penn,” said Lepler. “It was truly awesome to see alums from all of the last four years, and I was genuinely honored that so many came out on such short notice.”
Last week, Simar Bajaj ‘20 gave a presentation to Harker students to expand on the points made in an essay he co-wrote that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in January. In the piece, he and Dr. Fatima Stanford argue that distrust of COVID-19 vaccinations among Black Americans is the result of decades of systemic racism built into the medical profession, and that too much attention is focused on well-known incidents such as the Tuskegee syphilis study to explain hesitancy among Black Americans to accept the vaccines.
While the horrors of these incidents should not be forgotten, Bajaj said, “you know what challenges you’re facing through the health care institution if you’re a Black individual, especially during this pandemic, which has highlighted a lot of inequities.” Many studies have shown that Black patients are misdiagnosed and are refused treatment and painkillers at much higher rates.
“If you are a Black man in the emergency department and the doctor … is not giving you your painkillers, even though you’re visibly in pain,” Bajaj said. “In those moments … perhaps you are thinking about Tuskegee and historicizing your frustrations there, but perhaps more likely you are thinking about the racist doctor that’s not giving you your painkillers.”
Bajaj said an approach known as “barbershop-based intervention” could help build trust among Black Americans. These interactions, in which Black patients are cared for by Black health care professionals, provide racial concordance that has had very positive outcomes. In one study, barbershop-based intervention brought the blood pressure of 64 percent of Black men to normal levels, compared to just 12 percent of the control group who continued to visit their primary physician. “Barbershops are often forums of camaraderie for Black individuals,” Bajaj said. “There’s this relationship between the barber and those getting their hair cut that is very close.”
He also cited research performed by Dr. Stanford that demonstrated an increased interest in seeking information when COVID prevention messages were delivered by Black physicians. “There’s a lot of information being thrown at us during the pandemic, a lot of which is incredibly important to understand and lot of which can impact health literacy,” Bajaj said. “So you can see the implications here.”
Lay press coverage that zeroes in on Tuskegee and other historical atrocities, Bajaj said, can also further the damaging idea that racism in medicine is mostly in the past. “I found it incredibly frustrating when I would read these lay press articles where they’d try to [explain that] Black individuals don’t trust the vaccine because of Tuskegee or because of J. Marion Sims or because of this or that,” he said. “And I thought such a framing is incorrect and harmful.”
Simar Bajaj ‘20, now in his first year at Harvard, was recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the most prestigious peer-reviewed medical journals. His piece, co-authored with Fatima Stanford, a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, examines the relationship between systemic racism and the reluctance in Black communities to accept COVID-19 vaccines. Reasons cited include the persistence of wrong diagnoses and denial of necessary treatment for Black Americans. The article also proposes that Black health experts be the directors of messaging to Black communities to increase trust of the vaccine.
This summer, Harker’s upper school journalism department created the Humans of Harker Magazine, which arrived in the Harker community’s mailboxes in July, as a tribute to the Class of 2020. It features photos and small profiles of students from each of the 2020 senior advisories, as well as special messages from upper school head Butch Keller, dance teacher and Class of 2020 dean Karl Kuehn and alumni director Kristina Alaniz.
The magazine is named after the series of videos produced profiling members of the senior class and was conceived at the start of editor-in-chief Saloni Shah’s junior year. “As Humans of Harker editor-in-chief, I discussed my vision for Humans of Harker with Ms. Austin,” said Shah, now a rising senior. “In addition to its multi-platform content, I brought up the possibility of creating Humans of Harker’s own publication, a magazine.”
With the onset of shelter-in-place orders in the spring, production of the magazine went ahead to honor the Class of 2020, which faced extraordinary circumstances as COVID-19 caused nationwide school closures. “Our journalism staff wanted to pay tribute to the Class of 2020 and bring the community together during these unprecedented times,” said Shah.
Lead designer Anoushka Buch, a rising senior, arranged the student photos and profiles and the pages were designed and laid out by Buch and Talon yearbook staffers Nilisha Baid, Shreya Srinivasan and Helen Zhu, all rising seniors.
According to Shah, the magazine has been very well-received. “I’ve received so much love from our entire community whether it be students, alumni or even parents,” she said. “Alumni have told me how much the magazine means to them, especially since they were unable to experience the end of their high school career with their best friends; students have expressed their gratitude at being able to learn more about their peers and parents have emphasized their joy of seeing their children featured and recognized.”