On Dec. 12, a special online charity concert will be held to raise funds for the families of firefighters who lost their lives battling the deadly wildfires that have burned across California since August. The concert, organized by Nathan Liu, grade 9, will be broadcast on Facebook.
“As we navigate these unprecedented times of the COVID-19 pandemic and the continued wildfires in California, I just want to contribute my time to host an online music concert to pay tribute to those fallen heroes [and] also to raise funds to provide emotional and financial assistance to families of fallen firefighters,” Liu said. Last week, independent TV station KTSF featured Liu on a segment about the concert.
The performers include veteran professional musicians, including Sandra Wright Chen, a highly regarded concert pianist and Steinway Artist; bassist Joshua Thurston-Milgrom of the department of music at Stanford University; and violinist Kei Obata. Student musicians Callie Yuan, Shayla He, Ella Yee, Jerry Li and Vardaan Ghai, all grade 9, also will be featured, and Liu also will perform. “The fact that a concert consisted of mostly my peers from Harker proves how talented our Eagle community is,” said Liu. “Due to the pandemic, we were not able to practice together or have an in-person concert, therefore, we heavily rely on remote communication technology to collaborate, such as emails, chat, Zoom and cloud document sharing to brainstorm about the concert.”
The concert is scheduled to go live on Saturday at 7 p.m., and Liu advised those who wish to attend to like the concert’s Facebook page and keep an eye out for a notification when the event is live.
Last week, Rohan Shah ’10 was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in the Retail & Ecommerce category. Extend, the company he co-founded in 2019, provides an easy method for merchants to offer warranties and protection plans. Its high-profile clients include Logitech, Harman and Advance Auto Parts. Extend allows customers to easily file claims online and receive fast approval, and the company receives a portion of each warranty sale. Extend’s $56 million in funding has come from benefactors including PayPal Ventures, Meritech Capital and Pritzker Group Ventures.
A Harker Lifer, Shah was also a three-sport athlete, which earned him the Super Eagle award for Harker athletes who participate in three sports in a single semester. As a football player, Shah was invited to play in Silicon Valley Youth Classic High School Football All-Star Game in 2010.
Ayan Nath, grade 11, recently placed second in American Protege’s We Sing Pop competition. He is slated to perform in the American Protege Summer Gala concert, scheduled to take place in June 2021 at the Isaac Stern Auditorium, located in New York City’s Carnegie Hall. The concert will also feature performers from Canada, China, Germany, India, Italy and South Korea.
Nath’s interest in music began at a very young age, and he has performed in events at Harker as well as Bay Area events such as the Stanford Jazz Festival. He was also invited to perform at Carnegie Hall in 2019 after winning an International Music Talent Award for his performance on the tabla, an Indian percussion instrument.
As the future middle school campus continues to take shape, Mike Bassoni, Harker facility manager, details how the site is being readied for winter weather in the latest construction update!
Earlier this week, Amiti Uttarwar ‘10 was named to the annual Forbes 30 Under 30 list in the Finance category. Uttarwar was recognized for being the first known woman to become a Bitcoin Core contributor and becoming one of the few paid developers of bitcoin’s code when she was awarded a joint grant of $150,000 from OKCoin and HDR Global in June. A profile of Uttarwar published by Forbes in July chronicled her life as the child of Indian immigrants who found a passion for community service at a young age, eventually becoming a board member of Girls For A Change, a San Jose-based organization that encourages girls to develop local projects that benefit their communities.
After graduating from Harker, she attended Carnegie Mellon University, majoring in information systems. She eventually landed at Simbi, where she discovered her love of cryptocurrency. After a stint at a company called Coinbase, Uttarwar took a residency at Chaincode Labs in 2019 to become a Bitcoin Core developer, working directly with bitcoin’s underlying code. Her work at Chaincode resulted in a sponsorship by the Hong Kong-based crypto company Xapo and the landmark OKCoin/HDR Global joint grant.
Senior Hari Bhimaraju recently published a paper in the Biometrics & Biostatistics International Journal, a peer-reviewed journal specializing in biological sciences and public health. Her paper, titled “Low-cost enhancement of facial mask filtration to prevent transmission of COVID-19,” examines a variety of low-cost masks to determine their effectiveness in containing the spread of COVID-19. “COVID-19 disproportionately affects people in low-income communities, who often lack the resources to acquire appropriate personal protective equipment and tend to lack the flexibility to shelter in place due to their public-facing occupations,” reads the abstract to the paper.
Bhimaraju’s research was part of a summer internship, but due to safety concerns, she had to conduct all of her research at home. “This is a great example of how resourceful our students are in creating independent research opportunities for themselves,” said Anita Chetty, upper school science chair. “But moreover, this is of course a very important piece of work that has societal implications.”
In the segment, Lu shares his motivation for co-founding YAPA, which stems from his own love of learning and the desire to foster that love in younger kids. “I’m someone who really enjoys learning, and this would be a missed opportunity if we didn’t do something like that,” Lu told CBS.
The group’s performance of Ysaye Barnwell’s “Spiritual” was recorded and posted to YouTube as part of the annual C# Harvest Concert, which took place virtually this year. The event is organized by CMU C#, the vocal club that oversees D Flat Singers and other vocal ensembles. “Since holding a live concert wasn’t an option this year, we decided to make it virtual,” said Banga. “The structure of the concert was the same as usual in that we had acts by C#’s performance groups and other CMU a cappella groups, and we also held auditions open to the entire CMU community for the smaller group acts.”
Adapting to the virtual format meant finding new ways to rehearse and put together a performance. “We meet regularly using Zoom, but the lag makes it impossible to sing as a group,” Banga said. “So, we spend most of our rehearsals talking about musicality, learning new techniques and giving individual feedback.”
To create the performance for YouTube, the singers each recorded themselves singing their parts along with the conductor’s recording. “Afterwards, the rest of the choir recorded themselves while listening to the section leader recordings,” said Banga. “This way, we could blend with each other even when we weren’t in the same room.”
The decision to support 1Hood stemmed from the wave of massive protests that took place this year in response to police killings of Black Americans. “The Black Lives Matter movement impacted us all so much this year, and like many others, we were extremely upset and frustrated by the injustices in our country,” Banga noted. “After a great deal of reflection on what we could do as an org, we realized that there is a tremendous lack of diversity in mainstream Western choral music.” As such, Banga and the D Flat Singers’ conductor decided to sing pieces by living Black composers for the entirety of the semester. “We’re currently working on commissioning a piece by a Black composer for next semester,” Banga said. “C# also committed to donating all proceeds from our concerts to BLM related organizations, and 1Hood was a perfect match since they’re a Pittsburgh-based organization that supports Black artists and activists.”
Over the weekend of Nov. 7-8, 16 upper and middle school students took part in BearMUN, a Model UN conference hosted by the Model UN team at UC Berkeley. The conference featured debates between students on a wide range of topics, including the COVID-19 pandemic and the colonization of Mars.
Several students had strong showings at the conference, including sophomore Krish Maniar, who won Outstanding Delegate for representing Iraq in the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia. Junior Daniel Wu also won Outstanding Delegate for representing Sima Cuo in the Crisis Committee for the Unification of the Warring States Period.
Other strong performers were junior Akhilesh Chegu, who received an honorable mention for UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia; sophomore Trisha Variyar, who received a verbal commendation for the Court of Versailles: The Reign of Louis XIV crisis committee; Anika Mantripragada, grade 9, and Luke Wu, grade 7, who were each awarded a verbal commendation for their work in the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia; and Alice Tao, grade 9, who was awarded a verbal commendation for her work on the Unification of the Warring States Period Crisis Committee.
Junior Riyaa Randhawa was recently published in The Milbank Quarterly, a peer-reviewed journal that covers health care policy. The paper, written during a summer internship with Harold Pollack of the University of Chicago, argues that the United States and countries in Central and South America must work together to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Even though this was not a straight science paper, a lot of the skills I used throughout the process of writing this paper were from [upper school science teacher Chris Spenner’s] class,” she said. “The practice and real research papers I wrote in class…really benefited me here!”