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 hosted a basketball tournament to build awareness of the Hi5 Youth Foundation in the athletic center this past weekend. Organized by Akhila Ramgiri, grade 12, it was the inaugural event for the organization’s U.S. offices. The organization, founded in 2015 and based in India, is dedicated to improving the lives of children through sports – mainly basketball. The event included free throw and 3-point shooting contests, and food and soft drinks were available for purchase. Eight teams from various high schools participated in the event.
“I got involved when the founders of the organization were visiting the Bay Area (where they lived before they moved back to India),” said Ramgiri. “They told me about what they were doing, and because I have played basketball my entire life, the cause appealed to me.”
About 300 people attended the event. “The event was great,” said Ramgiri. “It was the first event that Hi5 USA has had, so it was a great way to kick off! The organization’s motto is ‘children helping children.’” They want the adults in the organization to provide the infrastructure, but they want high school kids like myself to be the driving force in helping the kids in India. So, to mobilize high school kids, we decided to hold this tournament to seek out kids like myself who are passionate about basketball and may want to volunteer or get involved.
“The players and spectators had a lot of fun and it was a great time. This was primarily meant to be an awareness event rather than a fundraiser, however, the money that was raised will be put toward resources such as clothes and basketball shoes for the kids in the Hi5 programs in India.”
Ramgiri has seen the results of the organizations efforts firsthand. “I went to visit the kids for one week during the summer,” she said. “The impact that I saw was incredible. Some of the children have really turned their lives around through basketball. It provides them a means for expression and a way to seek something bigger for themselves and gives them hope that they are more than their family’s income. I would strongly encourage anyone who is passionate about sports or helping children to consider joining the Hi5 USA team or if they had the chance to try to make it out to Mumbai, India, to experience this firsthand.”
In recognition of Constitution Day, recognized this past Monday, upper school history teacher Julie Wheeler’s AP U.S. history students participated in a video chat discussion on the First Amendment with students from Christopher Columbus High School in Miami.
“My students learned a lot about the First Amendment and how complex the rule of law actually is when you try to explain yourself to an attorney,” Wheeler said. Paul W. Kaufman, an assistant U.S. attorney from Pennsylvania, served as a moderator for the discussion.
The National Constitution Center chose Wheeler’s students to be part of its classroom exchange, in which 26 classes nationwide (comprising about 650 students) were chosen to take part in discussions about the U.S. Constitution. Discussions were student-led and moderated by legal scholars and practicing lawyers.
Harker is pleased to announce its 2018-19 endowment awardees. Each student will receive a grant to help him or her write a research paper on a humanities subject. The scholars, all seniors, work throughout the year to define, research and write on a topic of their choosing, and papers are presented at a reception in the spring.
The two endowments, the John Near Excellence in History Education Endowment Fund, established in 2009, and the Mitra Family Endowment for the Humanities, established in 2011, provide funding each year for eight or nine seniors to pursue topics of their choice in depth. Previous papers can be found on the Harker website.
The awardees are:
2019 John Near Scholars: Logan Bhamidipaty, mentored by Byron Stevens and Lauri Vaughan; Prameela Kottapalli, mentored by Mark Janda and Sue Smith; Leon Lu, mentored by Carol Green, Susan Nace and Meredith Cranston; Kelsey Wu, mentored by Kelly Horan and Sue Smith.
2019 Mitra Family Scholars: Nikhil Dharmaraj, mentored by Clifford Hull and Meredith Cranston; Rose Guan, mentored by Ruth Meyer and Meredith Cranston; Haris Hosseini, mentored by Andrea Milius, Josh Martinez and Sue Smith; Constance Horng, mentored by Roxana Pianko, Susan Nace and Lauri Vaughan; Katherine Tian, mentored by Damon Halback, Chris Spenner and Lauri Vaughan.
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.
Alumnus ’09 heads up DoorDash sustainability initiative in SF
David Kastelman ’09 has co-authored an article on DoorDash’s sustainability initiative! https://blog.doordash.com/introducing-project-dash-bbc61ac0cb8c
Kastelman is business operations manager for DoorDash’s San Francisco operation and is a member of the Aquilones, a group of Harker students who attended the G8 conference in Wismar, Germany, who were featured in a retrospective in the summer 2018 issue of Harker Magazine (page 48) https://issuu.com/theharkerschool/docs/harker_magazine_summer_2018
Graduate joins conservative political advocacy group in Washington, D.C.
Tyler Koteskey ‘11 began working for Americans for Prosperity, founded by brothers David and Charles Koch.
“Americans for Prosperity works to recruit, educate and mobilize citizens nationwide to support policies advancing a free and open society of mutual benefit,” Koteskey said. “I’m joining AFP’s headquarters policy team as an analyst focused primarily on foreign policy and criminal justice reform, where I’ll help translate the organization’s broader vision into practical policy stances that advance it. I’ve enjoyed politics since my time at Harker and it’s fulfilling to go into an office every morning to advance what I believe in.”
The organization was founded in 2004 and is a libertarian/conservative political advocacy group, according to Wikipedia. “As the Koch brothers’ primary political advocacy group, it is one of the most influential American conservative organizations,” the website notes.
Sonia Rastogi ’05 forges ahead with UNICEF work
Sonia Rastogi ’05 was noted in a post by the Taipei American School. She works for UNICEF supporting communities, especially women and girls, affected by crises, here is her bio from their website https://lnkd.in/e4_8KEs
“Sonia Rastogi serves as the GBV Guidelines Information Management Specialist. She is a gender-based violence and public health practitioner with expertise implementing and coordinating GBV, WASH, Education, Livelihoods and Youth programming in complex emergency settings. Most recently, Sonia served as the Head of Office in Bentiu, South Sudan with Mercy Corps. She is committed to developing evidence-based, accountable and intersectional programs and policies for people most affected by crisis. Prior to working in the humanitarian sector, Sonia advocated for policies and programs at the U.S. local, state and national level for women and girls living with HIV. She holds a Master in Public Health from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.”
Very nice post by the Taipei American School https://www.tas.edu.tw/fs/pages/news?post=sonia-rastogi-visits-tas-in-september-20180810
Such a pleasure to see another alumna working for the greater good!
We love to hear what our alumni are doing, be it family, work or play! Send your alumni updates to news@harker.org, and don’t forget to include a photo! We’ll also include notices in the Class Notes section of Harker Magazine.