Sadhika Malladi, grade 9, received an Aspirations in Computing Award from the National Center for Women in Informational Technology (NCWIT), which recognizes young women in high schools across the country for their achievements in the various fields of computing. The NCWIT chooses awardees based on their aptitude, leadership skills, academic standing and their future goals for a career in computing. Malladi chose upper school AP Computer Science teacher Richard Page to endorse her.
Malladi said that winning the award has introduced her to a community of inspiring women in the computing industry. “I’ve been welcomed into this community of amazing and inspiring women who work in the computing field and many high school girls who share a similar interest in computing,” she said. “More than the prestige of the award, I’m excited to be part of this community because they share exciting technological opportunities and scholarships with everyone.”
Prizes that Malladi received for winning the award included an iPod Touch, a $250 Amazon gift card and a tour of the Google campus.
Previous Harker winners of this award include Sierra Lincoln, grade 12, Shreya Nathan ’11, Vivian Wong ’10 and Jacqueline Wang ’13 (deceased).
On March 16, more than 143 students from 23 high schools came to the Harker campus for the third annual Harker Invitational Programming Contest. The event pits teams of three students against each other in two challenge rounds of problem-solving and programming.
The Harker Invitational is the only high school programming contest in the Bay Area that is organized and run by high school students. Harker junior Divyahans Gupta, grade 11, and seniors Lynda Tang, Maddie Dawson and Wilbur Yang led the effort which included fundraising, problem writing, generating the scoring software, getting a keynote speaker and organizing a college fair.
The event was originally created by Christine Chen ’10 in order to provide a forum that lets students interested in computer science, especially girls, compete. Many schools lack a computer science program, especially schools in economically disadvantaged areas. Even in affluent areas, many schools lack a CS program. One key objective of the contest is to give these students an outlet for their interest in computing.
This year’s contest attracted students from throughout the Bay Area, including San Francisco and Albany.
Registration for the contest filled almost immediately. Given the demand, the Programming Club hopes to increase the number of teams by about 15 percent next year. In addition to competing in the programming contest, students were treated to an amazing interactive talk by Dr. Dan Garcia of the University of California, Berkeley, who spoke about his research in game theory. The auditorium in Nichols Hall was filled with students who participated in several activities orchestrated by Garcia that illustrated his work. The students were spellbound and participated eagerly.
Following lunch in the Edge catered by Harker chef Danae McLaughlin, participants visited with professors from the University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Clara University, Stanford University and Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Tom Cortina of CMU commented on how well the contest was run and said that he is looking forward to being invited to next year’s contest; he said it was well worth the trip from Pittsburgh.
The contest was made possible by generous donations from the Harker parent community and SanDisk. The officers and members of the Programming Club are to be congratulated for another overwhelmingly successful day of computer science.
Harker teams took the top two spots at the Middle School Regional Science Bowl competition on March 3, held at the National Hispanic University. The first-place team was captained by Venkat Sankar, grade 8, who led eighth graders Arjun Subramaniam and David Zhu as well as Edgar Lin and Rajiv Movva, grade 7. The second place team consisted of team captain Peter Wu, Brandon Chow and Nikhil Manglik, all grade 8, and Adrian Chu and Shaya Zarkesh, both grade 7.
“It was fun to watch the two teams play against each other in the final match. It was almost like their Friday practice but a bit more intense,” said middle school science teacher Vandana Kadam. Wu’s team actually claimed a victory over Sankar’s team earlier in the tournament, but the two teams met again in the finals, with Sankar’s team winding up victorious. “Both teams played exceptionally well,” Kadam noted. The winning team will head to the National Science Bowl in Washington, D.C., in late April.
In February, several members of the Harker chapter of the Triple Helix, an international organization that publishes scientific articles by university students, headed to England to attend this year’s Triple Helix conference at Cambridge University. Harker journalism has the full story. Harker became the first high school to charter a chapter of the Triple Helix in 2011.
San Jose Mercury News , Jan. 23, 2013: Paulomi Bhattacharya, grade 12, is mentioned in an article about Bay Area student finalists in the Intel Science Talent Search
San Jose Mercury News, Nov. 30, 2012: Varun Mohan, grade 11, is featured in a brief story about his exceptional performance at a recent math competition in Mexico.
San Jose Mercury News, Dec. 5, 2012: Seniors and Siemens competition regional finalists Paulomi Bhattacharya, Rohan Chandra, Zareen Choudhury and Ashvin Swaminathan are mentioned in a story about the competition in the paper’s “Around the Valley” section.
Society for Science announced Wednesday that Paulomi Bhattacharya, grade 12, has been named one of 40 finalists in this year’s Intel Science Talent Search, becoming the first Harker student to be named an Intel STS finalist and a Siemens contest finalist in the same year. Bhattacharya, who was also a Siemens finalist last year, “is a classic example of a student who has gone through our whole research program,” said science department chair Anita Chetty.
Bhattacharya found the inspiration for her project, titled “A Novel AAA-ATPase p97/VCP Inhibitor Lead for Multiple Myeloma by Fragment-Based Drug Design: A Computational Binding Model and NMR/SPR-Based Validation,” while interviewing for a position at the California Institute of Quantitative Biosciences at Univeristy of California, San Francisco, last year. “As I discussed possible projects with my professor, he mentioned a post-doctoral research group in the department that was working on a National Cancer Institute-funded project,” she said. “But the target protein was proving to be very difficult, and even after a year they had few significant results.”
Eager to help and seeking a new experience, Bhattacharya joined the team and began working on one of three unexplored drug target regions. “I designed an independent project and worked separately from the group throughout the summer, reading background literature, learning the molecular modeling techniques, using NMR/SPR spectroscopies, and learning the underlying theories of physics and chemistry,” she said.
In choosing the project, Bhattacharya expressed her desire to add to the field of cancer research. “I know far too many who have fought cancer without success,” she said. “Consequently, I jumped at the opportunity to pursue a cure for multiple myeloma. The cause that I was fighting for strengthened my resolve to creatively make an impact by scientific advancement.”
In addition to her success in these contests, Bhattacharya has also been an active member of Women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (WiSTEM) and other clubs, written for the Triple Helix Online and presented at the Harker Research Symposium on multiple occasions. “She represents a student who has taken advantage of not only the clubs, but of internships, research classes and the many other opportunities available to her in the research program,” Chetty said.
Bhattacharya has expressed her thanks to the many Harker teachers in various programs and disciplines who have supported and mentored her since she started at Harker in grade 5, including lower school history teacher Pat Walsh, middle school math teacher Vandana Kadam, middle school biology teacher Lorna Claerbout, middle school history teacher Cyrus Merrill, upper school science department teachers Chetty, Mala Raghavan, Chris Spenner, Robbie Korin and Richard Page and math teacher Victor Adler.
She also mentioned her sincere gratitude to her professor at UCSF, Dr. Matthew Jacobs, “for giving me the opportunity to work with him in this emerging field,” and her post-doctoral mentor at UCSF, Dr. Michael Chimenti, for offering his guidance to her throughout the project.
The semifinalists, all grade 12, are Paulomi Bhattacharya (“A Novel AAA-ATPase p97/VCP Inhibitor Lead for Multiple Myeloma by Fragment-Based Drug Design: A Computational Binding Model and NMR/SPR-Based Validation”), Deniz Celik (“Computation of the Cell Phone-Induced SAR Distribution in a 3D Multi-Layered Model of the Human Head/Brain using Finite Element Analysis”), Jenny Chen (“RNAi of Rec12 in Schizosaccharomyces pombe: The Effect of Meiotic Recombination Inhibition on Fungicide Resistance”), who performed all of her research at Harker, Andrew Luo (“The Kinematics of Andromeda’s Diffuse Ionized Gas Disk”), Payal Modi (“Understanding the Chemical Inhomogeneities in Globular Clusters: Examining M4 and M5 for Trends in Elemental Abundances”) and Ashvin Swaminathan (“Surreal Analysis: An Analogue of Real Analysis for Surreal Numbers”).
A total of 26 students submitted projects for this year’s contest, each student spending countless hours doing research, writing and refining in preparation, with much help and encouragement from their mentor teachers in Harker’s science department.
“We could not be more proud that our students were recognized for the culminating efforts of their entire research process,” said Jennifer Gargano, assistant head of school for academic affairs. “The process reflects so much of who we strive to be – our students putting forth great efforts to deeply learn about and understand a topic they are truly interested in.”
The semifinalists each received a $1,000 prize and a chance to head to Washington, D.C., for the final stages of the contest, the winner of which will receive $100,000. More information about the semifinalists will appear on Society for Science’s Facebook page in the coming weeks. The finalists will be announced Jan. 23.
In early November, this year’s Siemens Competition regional finalists gave presentations of their research to Harker students and faculty in the Nichols Hall auditorium. Ashvin Swaminathan, Paulomi Bhattacharya and Rohan Chandra, all grade 12, and Zareen Choudhury, grade 11, each gave presentations on the projects that they would be presenting at the regional finals later in the month.
After the presentations concluded, each student took questions from the audience concerning the findings shared in the presentations and the methodology used to reach their conclusions.
The Siemens Foundation announced today this year’s semifinalists and regional finalists in the Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology. Ten Harker students, four finalists and six semifinalists, were among the students named. Harker students submitted a total of 24 group and individual projects for the contest. One third of the finalists from California are Harker students. They are: Ashvin Swaminathan (individual), Paulomi Bhattacharya (individual), Rohan Chandra (individual), all grade 12, and Zareen Choudhury (group), grade 11. This year’s semifinalists are: Andrew Luo (individual), Kevin Susai (individual) and Ravi Tadinada (group), all grade 12, Anika Gupta (group) and Saachi Jain (group), both grade 11, and Andrew Zhang (group), grade 10. Each of the regional finalists were awarded $1,000.
All of the students spent many hours doing advanced research and analysis for the projects they submitted for the contest, which has thousands of entrants every year.
Learning and a whole lot of fun was had by grade 8 students during a recent biology lab class on calorimetry. Thanks to biology teacher Thomas Artiss, the students had the opportunity to run the perennial calorimetry lab, which involves burning food to estimate its caloric content. They also had the chance to warm their hands over roasting marshmallows!
It’s all about “kids doing science and having fun,” enthused Artiss, who used the lab experiment as an opportunity to teach his students about how calorimeters are used to determine the energy content of foods by burning them in an oxygen atmosphere and measuring the energy yield in terms of the increase in temperature of the calorimeter.