Last weekend, the Harker Research Symposium welcomed attendees to the upper school campus for the first time since 2019. This annual celebration of the sciences, organized by the students of Women in STEM, invites the Harker community to view presentations and hear talks by Harker students and experts in a variety of fields, as well as get a glance at the exciting innovations on the horizon.
In her morning welcome address, science department chair and symposium founder Anita Chetty remarked that more than 60 poster presentations were being given by Harker middle and upper school students, a new record for the event. Attendees spent much of the day perusing the spaces in the athletic center and Rothschild Performing Arts Center where the presentations were being hosted.
The theme of this year’s symposium, “STEM Will Save Us,” dealt with the many ways that STEM disciplines are responding to current and upcoming challenges. Kamini Varma, VP of genetic testing solutions R&D at Thermo Fisher, was the first morning keynote speaker. Her talk, titled “The COVID-19 Diaries,” covered her experience during the COVID-19 pandemic working in molecular diagnostics. It was a project that began not long after shelter-in-place orders were enacted, which Varma described as feeling like a diary or book. “I started to put together the COVID-19 diaries actually in April of 2020, when I was asked to present a talk, she said. “I had no clue that two years later, we would still be adding new chapters.”
Artificial intelligence was a major topic at this symposium, with Helm.ai demonstrating its self-driving software outside Nichols Hall for much of the day, while Harker’s AI Club gave a presentation on ethical and unethical uses of AI in the present and beyond. Also discussing this topic was the second morning keynote speaker, Yanbing Li, senior VP of engineering at Aurora, developers of the Aurora Driver self-driving system that has vehicles in testing in the Bay Area, Pittsburgh and Dallas. “Self-driving technology has been the pursuit of our generation,” she said. “It always feels so close, but it also feels still far away.” Li’s presentation covered the ways Aurora’s technology is addressing safety concerns while also bringing self-driving technology closer to being a fully realized commercial product.
At a special alumni panel, Steven Botte ‘82, Ashley Morishige ‘07 (via Zoom), Amy Rorabaugh ‘10, Simar Bajaj ‘20, Daniza Rodriguez ‘13, Jasmine Wiese ‘20 and Allison Sommers ’21 covered important topics in diversity, equity and inclusion, including changes that must be made in corporate culture to increase diversity, how the Harker community helped and supported them in affirming their identities and what improvements the community can make for a more equitable environment. Each of the panelists were given the opportunity to talk at length about their unique experiences and how to approach conversations about race, sexuality and gender identity.
Senan Ebrahim ’08 and Hassaan Ebrahim ’11, this year’s alumni keynote speakers, gave a presentation on their journey to co-founding Hikma Health, a nonprofit that provides free health data systems to organizations providing health care to refugees. Their path included partnerships with groups around the world and engaging with their network to find people who could help build the technology. The primary goal of Hikma Health is to provide readily accessible and up-to-date information to clinicians so that they can offer refugees “the kind of personalized care that they truly deserve as compared to what we had been observing routinely on the ground,” Senan said.
Throughout the day, guests visited the exhibitor area where companies including Google, Nvidia and Microsoft demonstrated some of their products. They also made their way to the Nichols Hall rotunda, where several stations of fun activities were set up for the younger science enthusiasts in attendance.
The first afternoon keynote speaker was Hari Mix, assistant professor of environmental studies and sciences at Santa Clara University and an experienced climber with a total of five months on Mt. Everest. Mix surveyed the various environmental, social and economic changes that have been brought to the area around Mt. Everest, as well as possible solutions to the problems posed by human waste and climate change, including those that have affected the people indigenous to the area of Nepal where the mountain stands. Mix, whose current goal is to reach the summit of Mt. Everest without the assistance of supplemental oxygen, advised the students in the audience to learn to appreciate the journey. “My lesson for The Harker School students today is to really focus on the process more than the achievement or the outcome,” he said.
Speaking last for the day was Upendra Mardikar, chief security officer at Snap Finance, who advised guests on how to be “Cyber Smart,” summarizing the different types of security risks presented by the growing presence of smart devices in our daily lives. These include threats from online predators, cyberbullying and the acquisition and sale of personal information. He also discussed some proper and improper ways to respond to these risks. Despite the many threats people should be cognizant of, Mardikar advised caution, not panic. “The idea is not to scare you,” he said. “Don’t be scared, just be careful.”
In April, Harker received a visit from a group of high school girls from New Zealand in what is expected to be the start of a new collaboration to increase interest and participation in STEM among young women.
Laura Sessions, science and technology manager for the Hutt City Council in Wellington, New Zealand, organized the trip as part of the city’s Innovative Young Minds residential program, which promotes young women’s participation in STEM by holding workshops and visiting technology businesses and research institutes, among other activities. “The Innovative Young Minds program was developed as a week-long residential program for high school girls to encourage them into further studies and careers in science and technology,” Sessions said. “The Wellington program is designed to ignite their interest and excitement in the sector, but then we wanted to offer further experiences that would continue to engage students and expand their horizons.”
To this end, alumnae of the program were invited to tour the Bay Area in the spring and visit the campuses of various science and technology companies, as well as Stanford University and the California Academy of Sciences.
While preparing for the trip, Sessions reached out to Harker and was introduced to upper school science department chair Anita Chetty. Due to fortunate timing, the IYM students’ trip coincided with the 2019 Harker Research Symposium in April, and Chetty invited the group to attend the event, tour the campus and meet with one of the symposium’s keynote speakers, Surbhi Sarna ’03. “She was a very wonderful resource for these girls and a great inspiration to them,” Chetty said. While meeting with the students, Sarna discussed entrepreneurship, her experiences as a woman in technology, and the process of creating and getting patents for new technology.
“At the research symposium, I learnt through the keynote speakers and loved speaking personally to Surbhi Sarna about entrepreneurship as a woman in science,” said IYM visitor Sophie Miller of Samuel Marsden College. “I found the advice to ‘not be an entrepreneur for the sake of being an entrepreneur’ very useful. I also loved learning about permafrost thawing and the affect it has on the environment from Dr. Max Holmes. I really had no idea that the thawing of permafrost played such a massive role in releasing carbon.”
Sessions’ discussions with Harker faculty also helped secure visits to Microsoft and Nvidia, and the students also were invited to visit the upper school campus and shadow Harker students for a day to learn about their daily lives at Harker. “My impression of the Harker’s students and faculty was very positive,” Miller said. “I found that they were very interactive and eager to learn about our New Zealand culture and also share about their own cultures. Everyone was very friendly, studious and interested in why we were in Silicon Valley. I got the impression that most of the students and faculty had high ambitions and were constantly aiming for the highest.”
Students also enjoyed touring Harker’s facilities and seeing its various amenities, including the anatomy table, which Sessions called “a hit” with the guests. “Many of our students are from small, rural schools and they do not have any advanced lab equipment,” Sessions said. “One student even went away determined to find funding to buy a centrifuge for her school!”
Chetty is hoping to have representatives from Harker’s WiSTEM organization visit New Zealand in the summer of 2020, culminating in a conference that would include a panel on climate change. “I really want to have a climate change panel and invite some dignitaries to be on the panel … so that our girls can experience what the people who live and work and research there are saying about what’s happening in their part of the world,” she said.
In one of its best-attended years to date, the Harker Research Symposium attracted about 800 visitors from across the Harker community to recognize the school’s dedication to the sciences and encourage sustainable lifestyles and policies.
Sustainability was the main theme of this year’s event, which fittingly began with upper school vocal groups Cantilena and Camerata performing J. David Moore’s “We Belong to the Earth” under the direction of music teacher Susan Nace. The first keynote speaker was Max Holmes, deputy director and senior climate scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center, whose talk detailed how the behavior of rivers around the world can offer insight into global climate change.
Sustainability themes also were prevalent at the exhibitors area at the Nichols Hall atrium, which remained a popular attraction throughout the day. A student-run booth detailing the ways in which people can make their lives more environment-friendly greeted visitors as they walked through the front doors of Nichols Hall, alongside booths showcasing marine life, new technologies and the crucial role bees play in our daily lives (as well as the dangers presented by their decreasing populations).
At the Nichols Hall auditorium, a panel of Harker graduates shared their career retrospectives, including how their time at Harker influenced their trajectories and crucial lessons learned through their experiences. “Your career path is going to be windy and you’re going to be meeting a ton of…different people along the way,” said Shephalie Lahri ’05, associate director of marketing and reimbursement at the genetic testing company Natera. “Carve your own path and make sure you have the right advocates and champions,” she advised. The Nichols Hall rotunda was also busy, as upper school students at the Stem Buddies stations showed young science lovers how to purify water, create a DNA helix and find microplastics in ocean water.
The auxiliary gym once again hosted middle and upper school poster presentations, as students explained and answered questions on their research on a variety of topics, including zoology, physics and social science.
Surbhi Sarna ’03 returned to the Harker Research Symposium as this year’s alumna keynote speaker, giving a talk on her journey from being a patient at the age of 13 to becoming a medical technology entrepreneur and developing a device for early detection of ovarian cancer. Her company, nVision Medical, was purchased by Boston Scientific for $275 million last April.
This year’s afternoon keynote was given by David Haussler, an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical institute and distinguished professor of biomolecular engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Haussler took the afternoon audience on an “Odyssey in to the Human Genome,” examining the field of genomics and how the human genome has evolved.