The 17th Harker Research Symposium on April 15 brought hundreds from the Harker community to the upper school campus to view student research, hear from fascinating speakers, explore a variety of booths and exhibits and more.
Opening speaker Janice Chen, co-founder and CTO of Mammoth Sciences, spoke on recent advances that have “really paved the way in helping us understand the relationship between our genes and our health.” Her talk covered, among other things, CRISPR sequences that have enabled key advances. “We’ve…been able to train our immune cells for instance, therapies to specifically find cancer cells while avoiding the healthy ones,” she said. “CRISPR is one of those breakthrough technologies that’s really making a difference in research and development.”
Rohit Vashisht, the morning keynote speaker, spoke on how data science can help address the disparity in the quality of healthcare in the United States, which negatively affects Black Americans, women and those who lack access to quality education, employment and housing. In his presentation, Vashisht covered his ongoing research in collecting and analyzing data across the country, efforts to curb inequalities in healthcare and methods to produce data that will result in more equitable decision-making.
Students and student clubs held several workshops during the day, including an introductory class on medical illustration, led by junior Anika Mantripragada and a beginner’s class on artificial intelligence held by the AI Club. Breakout sessions were held throughout the day, showcasing the research done by Harker upper school students, including Regeneron Science Talent Search semifinalists.
This year’s alumni speaker, Simar Bajaj ’20, presented on the importance of storytelling in passing good scientific policy. Bajaj, who has been involved in science journalism since 2020 and won Science Story of the Year from the Foreign Press association in December, discussed how facts and figures are not enough to sway public opinion. “The reality is that there was never a policy in the history of our country that would just pass because it was a good idea,” he said. “They pass because they’re able to open someone’s eyes, someone’s soul, to the impact, to the purpose.”
At a special alumni panel, Harker alums discussed the various ways their time at Harker led them to their current careers. Alison Rugar ’13 shared the story of how she discovered her love of science through softball. “Softball was actually the basis for my first science project, which I presented here at the Symposium,” she said. “As a pitcher, I depended really heavily on my curveball, and in order for breaking pitches to actually move when they cross the plate, you need to put a lot of spin on the ball…so my dad and I set out to measure how much spin I was putting on my pitches. We drilled a hole in a softball, stuck a magnet in, wound a coil of wire and used Faraday’s law of induction. And that was a really great experience. It gave me a lot of basic skills.”
Throughout the day, visitors headed to the auxiliary gym, where middle school students had set up posters to present their research, happily answering questions about their methods and findings. Younger attendees enjoyed the many activities set up at the STEM Buddies area, where stations were run by upper school students who guided the visitors through a series of fun experiments. During lunchtime, the much-loved chemistry magic show wowed the audience with eye-catching displays of various chemical reactions.
From April 9-10, Harker hosted the 15th annual Research Symposium, inviting the Harker community to experience the breadth of its research opportunities by viewing student presentations and hearing keynote speakers deliver fascinating talks on the theme of this year’s event: artificial intelligence, robotics and automation. The 2020 symposium was canceled due to safety concerns caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
This year’s symposium was held virtually with all presentations, keynote talks and exhibitions delivered via Zoom, requiring impressive coordination between event organizers, presenters and technology staff.
Throughout the two-day event, middle and upper school students delivered poster presentations on research they had conducted on topics such as environmental science, physics, astronomy and medicine. The presentations were held in special breakout rooms, with plenty of time scheduled for each speaker. Corporate exhibitors – which included Microsoft, NVidia, Oculus and ZeroUI – each received their own room that visitors could drop into at their leisure, mimicking the atmosphere of the exhibition area in previous years.
The event kicked off on Friday with Wayne Liu of Perfect Corp, whose app YouCam Makeup allows users to demo beauty products using artificial intelligence and augmented reality technology, and was named one of Time Magazine’s best innovations of 2020. Liu provided an overview of the history of artificial intelligence and how it developed into the technology used by YouCam Makeup. “Facial recognition is not new,” he said, “However, to get to the point where you can [try on makeup virtually] … the technology needs to be very precise.” To achieve this precision, Perfect Corp gathered and analyzed millions of hair color and skin tone samples, and their app uses 3,900 polygon meshes to achieve accurate results.
Dr. Ben Chung, associate professor of urology at Stanford’s School of Medicine, provided an overview of robotics-enabled surgery and how it has been used to make certain very difficult procedures much easier and safer, such as the removal of prostate cancer. He also showed footage of his own procedures using surgical robots in which he removed a tumor from a kidney. “Where the robotic platform really helps us is the ease of the suture,” he said. “Making sure that your suturing is exact is really important because you need to make sure that the patient doesn’t bleed afterwards.” As the technology of robotic surgery evolves, Dr. Chung said, it will be applicable to more situations, such as conducting surgery over long distances in situations such as on a battlefield or in a space station.
Any discussion of artificial intelligence and robotics invariably touches on the legal and ethical aspects of these fields, and Ryan Calo’s presentation on legal rulings on the use of robots was a great forum for the topic. Calo, a law professor at the University of Washington, explained that “robots have been with us for a very long and so we shouldn’t really be surprised that occasionally they have led to legal disputes.” These disputes extend as far back as the 1880s, when it was questioned whether using artificial wooden coins in vending machines constituted fraud. In the 1950s, courts found that robots could not be defined as dolls because they were not representations of human beings and thus could not be subjected to the same tariffs. Present day debates have centered on the ownership of artifacts retrieved by robots from shipwrecks and how to prosecute crimes in which machines are used to steal from homes.
Fitting for the symposium’s 15th anniversary, this year’s alumni keynote was delivered by Yi Sun ‘06, who 15 years ago was Harker’s first Science Talent Search finalist and a member of Harker’s first US Math Olympiad team, winning a silver medal. In his talk Sun, who now works as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago’s department of statistics, explained the process of how machine learning tasks often involve discerning signals from “noisy observations.” Using detailed diagrams, Sun discussed the mathematical concepts underlying the problem and how they are used to process data for electron microscopy.
The final keynote speaker for this year was Chelsea Finn, assistant professor in computer science at Stanford University, who presented on the process of teaching robots how to learn and solve problems the way humans do. Finn noted that while it was possible to teach robots to do certain tasks – such as piecing together a toy airplane or place shapes into a cube – through trial and error, these robots became highly specialized due to gathering data from very controlled environments using specific tools. Teaching robots how to perform “simpler, but broader” tasks with a greater range of applications is much more difficult, and Finn explained the methods she and her team have used to create robot “generalists.”
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.
The 13th annual Harker Research Symposium, held Saturday at the upper school campus, drew more than 700 people from the Harker community to learn more about “The Artificial Intelligence Revolution” – this year’s theme – and see the work of Harker student researchers.
Jeff Dean, a Google senior fellow with Google’s Brain Team and this year’s morning keynote speaker, attracted a large crowd to the Athletic Center for his talk on machine learning and how his team’s research has been applied to Google products. He also spoke about the ways machine learning will change how we live in the future, covering urban renewal through self-driving cars and better healthcare through improved informatics.
Attendees later made their way to the Nichols Hall atrium, where they perused the many exhibitors, including Microsoft, Nvidia, Roku and Solvvy, trying out virtual reality and holographic technology, as well as learning about advancements in video streaming and AI-driven customer self-service.
At the auxiliary gym, the middle and upper school poster presentations proved once again to be a popular attraction, as students gave detailed breakdowns of their research and findings to curious visitors. Breakout sessions also were held, during which Harker upper school students gave presentations on research projects they had conducted.
With artificial intelligence experiencing rapid growth, the symposium aimed to prepare future generations to enter (and perhaps have a hand in creating) a future of intelligent machines through a series of workshops for lower, middle and upper school students. In the upper school workshop, Harker parent and LodgIQ CTO Somnath Banerjee (Sumantra, grade 11, and Nila ’14) learned how to train neural networks and create a machine-learned image. Wayne Liu, general manager and vice president of business development at Perfect Corp., gave middle schoolers an introductory lesson on AI and how it is used in the real world, and got them started on an AI project of their own. Lower school students received a primer on AI and played games that taught key concepts in two separate workshops, one conducted by junior Natasha Maniar and sophomore Cynthia Chen, and another led by sophomores Joshua Valluru, Eileen Li and Vani Mohindra.
During lunch, attendees once again flocked to the quad to see chemistry teachers Andrew Irvine and David Casso (very safely) create balls of fire and spectacular plumes at the chemistry magic show, after which the crowd returned to the Athletic Center for the afternoon keynote address, delivered by Andrew Beck, co-founder and CEO of PathAI. In his talk, Beck detailed the work he is doing with PathAI, which aims to develop image recognition technology for use in pathology, including improving accuracy in the diagnosis and prediction of cancer. He also shared the impact he expects this technology will have on the medical field in the coming decades.
Alumna speaker Ramya Rangan ’12 delivered a talk on molecular machines to a packed Nichols Hall auditorium, detailing how discoveries about the inner workings of proteins and other macromolecules will lead to the design of human-made molecular machines, and the questions such advancements will bring.
Afternoon events also included talks by finalists from this year’s Siemens Competition and Regeneron Science Talent Search, with presentations given by senior Swapnil Garg and junior Katherine Tian, whose team project took them to national finals of the Siemens Competition, and seniors Justin Xie and Rajiv Movva, who were finalists in the Regeneron Science Talent Search.
The event closed with a panel discussion on the various research opportunities available to Harker students, delivered by upper school science teachers Anita Chetty and Chris Spenner, Harker parent Prasad Movva (Rajiv, grade 12, and Neil ’15), seniors Nastya Grebin, Amy Jin, Rajiv Movva and Justin Xie, and junior Katherine Tian.
Update: Here is the playlist of videos of speakers at the Harker Research Symposium. Topics ranged from AI to VR/ML to rockets! Students who were finalists in various science contests presented their research and the panel discussion was an informational presentation of the scientific research opportunities at Harker, geared towards younger students who are considering pursuing research in the near future. Enjoy!
Harker’s large community of science enthusiasts gathered at the upper school campus on April 15 for the 2017 Harker Research Symposium. Early arrivals packed the Nichols Hall auditorium for a talk by leading artificial intelligence expert Fei-Fei Li, who spoke about advancements in developing visual intelligence for computers.
Attendees then filled the Nichols Hall atrium, examining the many corporate exhibits, from companies including Google, IBM, Xilinx, Nvidia and Titanium Falcon. They later made their way to the quad for the lunchtime chemistry magic show, staged by Andrew Irvine, who awed the crowd with several spectacular chemical reactions.
This year’s alumni speaker was Evan Maynard ’09, who now works at Blue Origin as a propulsion development engineer. Maynard discussed his current work in making spaceflight more affordable, as well as the development of reusable rockets.
Throughout the day, Harker students presented their work at breakout sessions, detailing research they had done in a variety of scientific fields, including astronomy, medicine and climatology. At the upper school gym, visitors listened attentively to the many middle school students who gave poster presentations.
The afternoon keynote was delivered by Achin Bhowmik, vice president and general manager of Intel’s perceptual computing group. His talk covered technological advancements that have enabled machines to more closely sense and interact with the world around them.
This year’s symposium also included three very special student talks by Regeneron Science Talent Search finalists Evani Radiya-Dixit, Arjun Subramaniam and Manan Shah, all grade 12. The students shared specifics of the research that earned them their impressive accolades.
Following their presentations, Radiya-Dixit, Subramaniam and Shah were part of a panel discussion that included science department chair Anita Chetty, physics teacher Chris Spenner, juniors Amy Jin and Rajiv Movva and senior Sandip Nirmel. The panelists discussed Harker’s many opportunities for science research, before bringing the event to a close.
This article originally appeared in the spring 2016 Harker Quarterly.
As the Harker Research Symposium enters its second decade, a day of exciting talks, speakers and activities awaits the Harker community!
Throughout the day, Harker students will be giving talks about their own research via breakout sessions held in various rooms at Nichols Hall. Middle school students will be giving poster presentations in the upper school gym, encouraging attendees to inquire about their research.
Exhibitors such as Google, IBM, Lockheed Martin and Nvidia, and the ever-popular chemistry magic show, will dazzle the lunchtime audience.
In addition to the great exhibits and breakout sessions by Harker students, this year’s Harker Research Symposium promises another fascinating array of keynote speakers.
Omer Artun, the first morning keynote speaker, is the CEO and founder of AgilOne, a predictive marketing cloud designed to help retailers use analytical data and marketing campaigns to increase profitability. Previously, he worked at McKinsey & Co. as a consultant, was VP of strategic marketing at CDW/Micro Warehouse and served as senior director of B2B marketing for Best Buy’s For Business division.
Brienne Ghafourifar, another morning keynote speaker, is the co-founder of Entefy, a Palo Alto-based startup that Ghafourifar hopes will one day fundamentally change the way people use technology to interact. Its pre-market release valuation has reached $50 million. At 17, she became the youngest college graduate to raise $1 million in venture funding.
This year’s afternoon keynote will be given by Jeffrey Rothschild (Jackiel, grade 12; Isaac ’14), who spent a decade at Facebook as its VIP of infrastructure engineering.
He is now an investor and entrepreneurial mentor, and sits on the board of directors of Primary Data, Interana and Lytmus. Additionally,he is a part of Accel Partners’ venture development team and is on Vanderbilt University’s Board of Trust. As a philanthropist, he has worked with the Kisii Eye Care Institute, which provides restorative eye surgery to western Kenyans, and the Dairy Farmers of Cherangany, another Kenya-based organization.
Alen Malek ’05, currently a Ph.D. candidate at University of California, Berkeley, will be this year’s alumni keynote speaker.
A founding member of Harker’s robotics team, he later attended Stanford University, earning a B.S. in mathematics and an M.S. in electrical engineering. At Berkeley, he is working on his Ph.D. in computer science, performing research on sequential decision-making.
This event is open to all members of the Harker community and promises to be filled with fun and discovery. For more information, please visit www.harker.org/symposium.
This article originally appeared in the summer 2015 Harker Quarterly.
The community of researchers that Harker started building with its first research symposium in 2006 showed up in full force for the 10th annual event on April 11.
“We had a record number of student posters, student talks and exhibitors,” said symposium founder and director Anita Chetty, upper school science department chair. “The skills we’re teaching [students] about scientific research, they will take with them for a lifetime even if they don’t end up in a lab.”
Chetty cited the excitement of the teachers, staff, students and parents for expanding and sustaining this annual celebration of discovery and innovation.
This year’s event attracted about 450 to 500 people, including the community-minded Jin family. Shu Jin helped for months as a parent outreach coordinator for the event. His son Andrew, grade 12, presented his first-place work from the nationwide Intel Science Talent Search (STS). Andrew’s sister, Amy, grade 9, is also a researcher and a member of WiSTEM (Women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), the club that helps organize and run the symposium every year.
Outfitted in white lab coats, members of WiSTEM and the Research Club introduced speakers and hosted the popular STEM Buddies stations, where kids viewed EEG images of their brain waves, rolled marbles onto a blue fabric representing space-time and much more.
In addition to the talks, attendees flocked to interactive booths set up by the exhibitors: DynoSense, Google, IBM, mCube, Nod Labs, NVIDIA, Palo Alto Medical Foundation/ Sutter Health, South Asian Heart Center, Technical Instruments, Tesla, Trek Medics International, Upgrademe and Verizon, plus student startup Sail Research, and the Infinities and Subatomic Smarticles robotics teams.
As the symposium has grown over the years, so has the stature of research done by Harker students. Including Jin, 15 Harker students were named Intel STS semifinalists and three were finalists. In the most recent Siemens Competition, 13 students were California semifinalists and four of them regional finalists.
“Getting the opportunity to see all the incredible projects that the kids have done is really phenomenal,” said Harker alumna and keynote speaker Shabnam Aggarwal ’03, who graduated before the event existed.
Senior Steven Wang, one of 24 student speakers and one of the three Intel STS finalists, used computer methods to find a new gene associated with colorectal cancer and then tested the mutations in microscopic mini-organs in a Stanford University lab.
“I got to be on the forefront of organoid research and run my own experiment,” he said. “The lab niche was very fun. We ate lunch together and watched movies.”
Siemens regional semifinalist Ankita Pannu, grade 12, tackled the lack of organization in online cancer support group discussions.
“My main engineering goal was to help patients gather information,” said Pannu, who developed an algorithm to summarize and categorize information from posts. With no prior background in text mining, she asked for an informal internship at IBM’s research lab where a mentor pointed her in the right direction.
Throughout the daylong symposium, middle and upper school students displayed their endeavors on more than 50 posters in categories including engineering, nanoscience, microbiology, environmental science, bioinformatics and behavioral science.
Amy Dunphy, grade 9, purified the allergen in poison oak and worked on polymerizing it into a bigger chain of molecules to prevent transmission through the skin. She contracted the rash a few times in the name of science, but nodded yes without hesitation when keynote presenter James McClintock asked if she wanted to be a scientist.
McClintock is the endowed university professor of polar and marine biology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
“Antarctica is one of the richest marine environments on the planet,” he said, but rapid warming from climate change is altering the local weather and conditions that populations have depended on for millennia.
As the annual sea ice disappears, so do krill. Adélie penguins are declining as unseasonably late snow melts and floods their eggs. Sub-Antarctic gentoo and chinstrap penguins have moved in, as have king crabs. Antarctic marine life has no defenses against crushing claws.
“Communities always change, but over a few decades this is a profound change,” he said.
One of the repercussions could be the loss of medicinal chemicals; recent discoveries from Antarctic life include compounds active against cancer and H1N1 flu.
In the afternoon, father-son duo Suhas and DJ Patil had a “fireside” chat in wingback chairs in the auditorium, sharing their outlooks on education and entrepreneurialism.
Suhas, a former Harker parent (daughter Teja graduated in 2002), is the founder and retired chairman of Cirrus Logic, a semiconductor company. He’s seen in his son an example of where Silicon Valley is headed: “Our young people will need to get trained or they must train themselves to be very agile with respect to what they work on.”
DJ is the first chief data scientist at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and co-coined the term “data scientist.”
“Stick to your convictions,” he advised, “but listen to people and outside views to course correct.”
In a special session, John Wolpert, IBM’s Watson evangelist, discussed the new era of cognitive computing led by systems like Watson that can learn from context and see patterns in fragmented, unstructured data.
“It’s about extending the human capability,” he said, encouraging students to try solving problems with newly available Watson subsystems.
Watson algorithms have found new targets for cancer research and developed unique recipes praised by top chefs.
The second keynote speaker, David Mortlock, son of upper school statistics teacher Mary Mortlock, works at the White House as director for international economic affairs for the National Security Council.
Both in responding to the recent Ebola outbreak and pressuring Iran through sanctions to return to nuclear negotiations, the U.S. government “really relied on research and development … to try and make the world a slightly more prosperous and safer place,” he said.
Having your proposals embraced by the president is thrilling, he said. “It takes guts to say, ‘I have an idea and people should listen to me.’ It’s really exciting to see [Harker students] doing the same thing here with your work and presentations.”
Harker Alumni Researchers Share Latest Updates
From introducing underrepresented minorities to mathematical problem-solving techniques to undertaking lab work focused on better understanding the Ebola virus in West Africa, Harker alumni researchers are involved in numerous incredible projects. Read on for the latest updates.
Yi Sun ’06 Intel finalist, Second Place National
Yin Sun ’06 is currently a fourth year Ph.D. student in the mathematics department at MIT. “My research is in representation theory, a branch of mathematics which gives a precise algebraic understanding of the symmetries of a system. I am particularly interested in connections between these algebraic techniques and recent applications to statistical mechanics and high-dimensional statistics,” he said.
Recently, Sun also has been collaborating with fellow Harker alumnus Tatsunori Hashimoto ’07 on a project in machine learning. Outside of research, for the last eight years he has been involved in teaching high school students at the Math Olympiad Summer Program. “This year, I’m helping organize MathROOTS, a new summer program at MIT (mathroots.mit.edu), to introduce underrepresented minorities to mathematical problem-solving techniques,” he added.
Frank Wang ’08 Intel semifinalist
Frank Wang ’08 reports that he is currently a Ph.D. student in computer science at MIT, working on computer security.
Aaron Lin ’09 JSHS regional finalist
Aaron Lin ’09 lives in Boston. He attended Harker’s middle and upper schools. “Though I didn’t qualify for Siemens or Intel, I learned a lot about research while at Harker and had a blast at the local Santa Clara science fair, the California state science fair and the JSHS [Junior Science and Humanities Symposia]. Since then, I’ve continued research. The summer after graduation, and again a second summer during college, I performed research in Mark Davis’ immunology lab at Stanford and co-authored a research paper there, which appeared in the Journal of Immunology in 2011,” he said.
At Princeton, he joined the virology and proteomics lab of Ileana Cristea during his sophomore year. “By graduation in 2013, I wrote a thesis and a first author research paper, which appeared in Molecular & Cellular Proteomics in 2013, and another co-authored paper, which appeared in Proteomics this year,” he recalled.
After college, Lin was accepted into the Ph.D. program in virology at Harvard, and is currently in his second year there. In December, he passed his preliminary qualifying exams and officially became a Ph.D. candidate. After rotating through a couple labs, he joined the lab of Pardis Sabeti in March 2014.
“Interestingly, I actually met [Harker senior and national Intel Science Talent Search winner] Andrew Jin, who joined the lab for a summer research project. Though our expertise and research interests didn’t overlap much, I was blown away by his end-of-the-summer lab meeting presentation, and it’s pretty clear to everyone that Andrew will continue to succeed in the future. It’s been productive for me as well, as I have co-authored one research paper in mBio in 2015, have another co-authored manuscript in Cell under review and another co-authored manuscript in preparation,” he noted.
At the moment, Lin’s work focuses on understanding the genomic variation among Ebola virus isolates in the current West African outbreak. His lab is a leader in the field of high-throughput, deep sequencing of inactivated genomes from BSL-4 viruses such as Ebola and Lassa virus, and is now using this data about viral variation to learn about viral transmission, improve field diagnostics, and inform vaccine and therapeutic strategies.
“It’s great to hear the amazing news about Andrew, and the rest of the other Intel and Siemens winners as well! The growth in the research program at Harker has been outstanding, and I’m sure that the current students are paving the way for themselves, and will continue to do so into the future,” said Lin.
Vishesh Jain ’10 Intel semifinalist
“It was exciting to hear about Andrew’s achievement, as well as those of all the student researchers at Harker over the past five years,” said Vishesh Jain ’10. Jain reported that he is excited to start medical school this fall. “During my gap year, I am doing cardiovascular research and volunteering at Stanford, and I am working at the biomedical nanotech startup Bikanta,” he added.
For Shabnam Aggarwal ’03 Failure was a Means to Success and Happiness
Thanks to serendipity, hard work, passion – and most of all, failure – Shabnam Aggarwal ’03 is the happy CEO of the education technology company she started in India.
The alumna keynote speaker for the 10th annual Harker Research Symposium, Aggarwal assured parents and students that “failure is not a four-letter word. Failure is inevitable and failure is necessary.” It teaches resilience.
She experienced a rough academic patch in high school, but got into Carnegie Mellon and earned an electrical and computer engineering degree. Then she shocked her parents by quitting her high-paying job at Merrill Lynch on Wall Street to teach English in Cambodia to girls who had escaped the sex trade. In pursuing her passion for equality in education, she later had “six hard years in India,” trying everything from teaching preschool to designing cell phone games.
“I failed many, many, many times before arriving at this solution,” said about her Delhi-based business KleverKid, which works to bring the best teachers, coaches and tutors to the kids who need them most.
She asked parents in the audience to imagine sitting in the back of a canoe, letting their kids paddle even if they aren’t steering the way you’d advise.
“Often they’re going to make the wrong decision, but what’s imperative for them to master is picking up again and doing it over and over until they succeed.”
Both of Aggarwal’s parents were in the auditorium, and she shared the stage with her dad for a few minutes. “Through all these zigs and zags she’s gone through, she’s never given up,” Avnish Aggarwal said. “The investors saw her passion and persistence.”
She returned the compliment. “There would be one less person in the world trying to make a difference if my parents and teachers had never given me the space to fail,” she said.
The Harker Research Symposium celebrated its 10th year on April 11, as people from across the Harker community visited the upper school campus to see the work of the school’s dedicated research community.
Harker’s hardworking WiSTEM (Women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) club began organizing the symposium at the start of the school year. Anita Chetty, US Science Dept. Chair and WiSTEM advisor inaugurated and has overseen the event since its inception a decade ago.
“It’s a good event,” said member Anushka Das, grade 12. “We have really great keynote speakers and a lot of people in the audience (for talks). The students, families and parents come to see everyone’s kids. It’s a tight community.”
Middle and upper school students occupied venues throughout campus for most of the day, giving poster presentations in the gym and holding breakout sessions in various rooms at Nichols Hall, often with members of the scientific community as their audience. Presenters included senior Andrew Jin, a national winner in this year’s Intel Science Talent Search; Intel finalists Steven Wang and Rohith Kuditipudi, both grade 12; and Siemens Competition regional finalists Sadhika Malladi, Jonathan Ma and Vineet Kosaraju, all grade 11.
The Nichols Hall Atrium was the busiest spot for much of the day, with corporate exhibitors attracting throngs of attendees, who wandered from station to station trying out high-powered microscopes and virtual reality gadgets, and even jumping behind the wheel of Tesla vehicles. “The kids have great microscopy questions,” said Technical Instruments representative April Myles.
Outside Nichols Hall, the all-girl Infinities robotics team drove their robot, which boasts a holonomic drive system, multiple lift systems and passive intakes, plus rubber bands and string. The team is advancing to a world tournament this year.
Chemistry teacher Andrew Irvine wowed a lunchtime crowd of at least 250 people with flames and the shattering of liquid-nitrogen frozen bananas and apples. “He’s playing with his food,” one girl in the audience joked to her friend.
This year featured yet another impressive lineup of keynote speakers. The first, climate scientist Dr. James McClintock’s “From Penguins to Plankton” talk, filled Nichols Auditorium almost to capacity. McClintock is an Endowed University Professor of Polar and Marine Biology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. With more than 235 scientific publications and 14 expeditions to Antarctica in his career, he is considered a leading authority on Antarctic marine chemical ecology. “I’m very impressed with Harker,” said McClintock. “The students are very capable and excited and, to be honest, like college students. I’ve had several discussions with students at a level you’d expect in college.”
Another featured speaker was Dr. Suhas Patil, founder of top semiconductor company Cirrus Logic and creator of the fabless model of semiconductor manufacturing. Also among his many achievements, he co-founded the Indus Entrepreneurs, which has become the largest nonprofit in the world for budding entrepreneurs.
Harker alumna Shabnam Aggarwal ’03, now the CEO of KleverKid, shared the story of her journey from the wealth of Wall Street to the poverty of Cambodia, where she taught English to girls who had fled the world of sex trafficking. Later, in India, she explored various ways to combat illiteracy, which eventually led her to found her latest venture, KleverKid. Prior to her talk, Aggarwal spoke to a group of grade 5 students from Rocketship Si Se Puede Academy, answering their questions about the importance of technology, education and women’s issues in India.
“We have such great kids involved in science, and this is a nice opportunity for them to share with our community what they’re interested in,” said Diane Main, Harker director of Learning, Innovation and Design. “Last night the orchestra performed, today the sciences perform.”
On Saturday, March 29, at the upper school campus, The Harker School’s science department and the student WiSTEM Club (Women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) will present the ninth annual Harker Research Symposium. This prestigious event, which draws hundreds of attendees each year, serves to highlight the achievements of Harker students passionate about scientific research, as well as celebrate the wonders of research and innovation in Silicon Valley.
Harker students will give formal talks on the methods and results of the research they have done both at Harker and at collegiate and professional labs, much of which has earned recognition in the Siemens Competition and Intel Science Talent Search. The audience will include not only students and parents, but also members of the scientific community. The event is also an opportunity for middle school students to present their research through poster presentations.
Exhibitors from companies such as NVIDIA, IBM, Google and Tesla will offer glimpses at both current technology and what lies ahead, with eye-catching interactive demonstrations and displays.
New this year is the chance to test drive a Tesla, and an activity for grade 5 students, who can compete in a spontaneous STEM challenge. Returning favorites include a student/teacher panel discussion on Harker’s research program and a chemistry “magic show.”
The morning keynote speaker for this year’s research symposium is Dr. Claire Max, professor of astrophysics and director of the Center for Adaptive Optics at University of California, Santa Cruz. Over the last decade, adaptive optics technology has been used to enhance the capabilities of astronomical telescopes by correcting the blurring caused by turbulence in the atmosphere. This technology also is helping further the understanding of black holes in nearby merging galaxies. Dr. Max also will discuss the applications of this optical technology in imagining the human retina.
Ilya Sukhar ’03 will be this year’s alumni speaker. After graduating with honors from Cornell University with bachelor’s and master’s degrees, Sukhar worked as an engineer for the online video company Ooyala before working in product and engineering at Etact, which was acquired by Salesforce. He is now the founder and CEO of Parse, whose product greatly eases the process of creating mobile apps across multiple platforms. In 2013, Facebook acquired Parse, which is still independently operated.
This year’s keynote speaker is Salman Khan, the founder and executive director of the Khan Academy (khanacademy.org), a nonprofit organization dedicated to bringing high-quality education to people all over the world, free of charge. An MIT grad with degrees in computer science, mathematics and electrical engineering as well as an MBA from Harvard Business School, Khan began tutoring his cousin in math in 2004 while working at a hedge fund based in Boston. His clientele eventually grew to 15 family members and friends, prompting him to create software that would help its users practice the concepts they were learning. He also created YouTube videos to accompany the software. By 2009, Khan’s videos were receiving tens of thousands of views each month. Khan then decided it was time to make Khan Academy a full-time occupation. Today, Khan Academy provides thousands of learning resources, including more than 100,000 exercises and 4,000 videos, on a variety of subjects. It is now accessed by more than 6 million unique users each month, making it one of the most widely used online educational resources.
For information and a detailed schedule, please visit www.harker.org/symposium.
Harker’s eighth annual Research Symposium drew more than 400 attendees, who marveled at the many exhibits, student presentations, breakout sessions and guest speakers that have made the symposium into one of the school’s signature events, unique for being organized largely by the student-run WiSTEM, chemistry, research and Sci Fy clubs.
The upper school campus was abuzz with activity as early as 8 a.m., when the symposium officially began. One of the busiest areas for the entire day was the Nichols Hall atrium and rotunda, where exhibitors such as Google, Ericsson and Symmetricom offered demonstrations of their products and talked with attendees, in addition to providing a mere glimpse at the wealth of career opportunities available to students of the sciences.
One of the more impressive pieces of technology on display was Anatomage’s “virtual cadaver,” a 3-D rendering of a human body that could be examined in amazing detail via a large touch screen, enabling classrooms without access to a real cadaver to study the human body up close.
Elsewhere in the atrium, SeaLife Aquarium Maintenance presented various sea creatures for visitors to view and handle. East Bay Cardiovascular and Thoracic Associates, represented by Harker parent Murali Duran (Rohan, grade 9; Lea, grade 11; Roshan, grade 12), had a heart station set up where visitors could learn how to perform sutures using store-bought pig hearts.
A large portion of the event was devoted to formal talks, also known as breakout sessions, delivered by Harker students. In these talks, students gave presentations on scientific research projects that they had done, many of which earned the students finalist or semifinalist placings in the Siemens Competition and the Intel Science Talent Search. In addition to demonstrating the high level of research being conducted by the students, these sessions also offered students the chance to show their research to (and take questions from) members of the greater scientific community.
The breakout sessions covered a wide variety of topics. Ashvin Swaminathan, grade 12, presented an analysis of surreal numbers, for which he was named an Intel Science Talent Search semifinalist and a Siemens Competition regional finalist. At another session, senior Rohan Chandra, another Siemens regional finalist, discussed the brain’s reaction to various features of Beethoven’s famous fifth symphony. Meanwhile, Siemens semifinalists Anika Gupta and Saachi Jain, both grade 11, presented their research on how an uncharacterized gene may have a hand in lowering the risk of ulcers and gastric cancer.
Middle school students also had their chance to shine, showing the results of their work with the many impressive poster presentations set up in the gym. The enthusiasm of these students was evident as they explained their projects and their implications to the fascinated passersby.
As always, the lunchtime chemistry magic show was a treat for the midday audience, who oohed and aahed at brilliant flames, exploding eggs, liquid-carbon-frozen bananas and other wonders of chemistry, as they enjoyed food freshly prepared by Harker’s kitchen staff.
Also during lunch was a special talk by Nikita Sinha ’09, currently in her senior year at the California Institute of Technology, who discussed the research she was conducting for her senior thesis, as well as the life experiences that led her to choose medical research as a career.
The first of the keynote speakers at the symposium was Dr. Kristian Hargadon, assistant professor of biology at Hampden-Sydney College. Hargadon took the morning audience on a journey through his progression from a young student athlete with dreams of being an NBA star to becoming a decorated cancer researcher, in addition to discussing some of his current work.
Surbhi Sarna ’03, this year’s alumni speaker, shared her story with the early afternoon audience. After suffering from an ovarian cyst in her early teens, Sarna became determined to create better conditions in the field of female health. Toward this end, she founded the venture-backed nVision Medical in 2009 to develop technology that will help gynecologists more quickly detect ovarian cancer.
This year’s featured speaker was Nobel Prize-winning biologist Dr. David Baltimore, whose work at the California Institute at Technology has recently yielded a method for preventing the spread of HIV. Baltimore provided an overview of how his process of injecting a harmless virus containing antibodies into the muscles of mice prevented HIV infection. Baltimore and his team are currently preparing to test this process in humans.
Another highlight of the event was a special panel of notable women in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), which included such inspirational figures as Barbara Jones, project manager at the IBM Almaden Research Center; Monica Kumar, senior director of product marketing at Oracle; Tian Zhang, senior software engineer at IBM; and alumna Sinha.
The panel discussed the increasingly important role of women in the sciences, offering their insights into their respective fields as well as advice to the audience of young attendees on how to transform their love of science into successful careers.
The symposium closed with a panel of students and teachers providing students and parents with information on Harker’s research program and the various opportunities available, such as the Siemens and Intel contests, internships and research classes.