Video of this event is available on The Harker School’s YouTube channel: Part 1, Part 2
Right on the heels of astronaut Greg Chamitoff’s appearance, the Harker Speaker Series hosted another fascinating space-themed talk by Dr. Jill Tarter, director of Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) research at the SETI Institute in Mountain View. A well-known figure in the search for life on other worlds, Tarter’s research formed the basis for Jodie Foster’s character in the popular science fiction film “Contact.”
After introductions by Chris Nikoloff, head of school, and Harker student Govi Dasu, grade 12, an astrophysics enthusiast, Tarter jumped right into her presentation, titled, “Citizen Science and the Search for E.T.”
She explained that she and her team use radio telescopes to search for evidence of extraterrestrial (ET) intelligence, juxtaposing a photo of herself at a computer with a photo of Jodie Foster in “Contact” listening for signals with a pair of headphones. “I’m the one that doesn’t wear headphones,” Tarter quipped.
Tarter’s entire career as a scientist has been spent on SETI research, having served as a SETI project scientist with NASA, and then becoming the first employee at SETI when it incorporated in 1984. “I’ve only actually had two jobs in my life,” she said. Her current project is being the self-described “chief cheerleader” of setiQuest, an effort to engage the open community in SETI’s mission.
“We’re all transitioning,” said Tarter
. “At my ripe old age, I’m trying to learn how to do my business in a different way.” She used the language of the open-source computing community in saying that SETI was “moving away from the cathedral” of doing research on their own using large instruments, and moving toward “the bazaar,” a rich source of ideas and innovation.
“But it’s a little bit rough and tumble, too,” she explained. “You’ve got to have some sharp elbows and a thick skin to do well in this environment, and that’s what we’re trying to learn how to do, because we realize that not all smart people who are interested and passionate about SETI actually work for the SETI Institute, and they can help us to improve the search.”
Tarter then moved on to the greater topic of SETI research. “There are answers to questions about what is, what ought to be, who are we, why are we, and of course, who else might be out there,” she began. “Along that journey, we’ve discovered that our universe is vast, that our sun is one of 400 billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy.” As massive as that sounds, the Milky Way is only one of 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe, which itself only makes up four percent of the universe’s mass energy density. The rest she said, is made up of “dark matter, dark energy. ‘Dark’ is just an astronomical word for ‘we don’t know.’”
She pointed out that SETI research hasn’t set out to prove the assumed existence of sentient extraterrestrial life. “We just note the possibility, probably even the probability, given the size and the uniformity of the universe we find ourselves in,” she said.
Since 1995, about 550 planets have been found by watching stars that wobble as their planets orbit around them. The Kepler spacecraft, launched in 2009, has been searching for Earth-sized planets in orbit around stars similar to the sun, which may be the right temperature to contain liquid water necessary for life. Using its 95-megapixel camera to detect dips in the brightness of stars caused by their planets’ orbits, Kepler identified 1,235 exoplanet (the term for planets existing outside the solar system) candidates by staring at a tiny patch of the Milky Way between the Cygnus and Lyra constellations. Of those, Tarter said, 60 may be situated in the so-called “Goldilocks zone,” orbiting just the right distance from their stars to house the right temperature for liquid water.
That data, released in February, was followed up in September by another large set of data, which doubled the number of exoplanet candidates. One of Kepler’s most fascinating discoveries from that set was Kepler 16b, the first planet known to orbit two stars.
Although Kepler 16b is likely too cold to be habitable, “it shows us that it’s possible to have planets in stable orbits around binary stars, and since most stars out there are binaries, this is a whole lot more real estate that we know is out there, and some of it might be habitable,” Tarter said. Using statistical math, Tarter estimated that “maybe 500 million” planets in our galaxy are habitable.
In addition to people who search for life, Tarter said the SETI institute also employs astrobiologists who study the “origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe.” In order to understand what types of planets may be able to sustain life, they study life forms that are able to withstand extreme conditions here on Earth. “My colleagues are trying to find the answer to the question of what constitutes a biosignature,” she said. The presence of methane in our atmosphere caused by everything from termites to what Tarter termed “bovine flatulence,” for example, is one clue of the biological happenings on the surface. “Biology is leaving an imprint on our atmosphere, and perhaps we can find something like that in the atmospheres of other planets, but it’s very tricky to be able to say with absolute confidence that that particular chemical signature cannot be produced abiotically,” she said.
The presence of technology on other worlds is also a concern for SETI research, which also looks for so-called “technosignatures” from extrasolar planets. While earthly technologies could be detected by an advanced civilization, receiving their communications is another matter. “Our own technologies are in fact visible at interstellar distances by an advanced technology,” Tarter said, “and perhaps their technology could be detected by us at radio or optical or some other wavelength, if we only had a determined search to systematically look for it.”
SETI’s success is not only dependent upon whether or not other civilizations exist, but also whether or not their technology lasts long enough on a cosmic time scale. “We are a very young technology, 100 years, in a very old galaxy, whose age is 10 billion years,” she said. “Can we become an old technology? Is technology on average a stabilizing influence, and do technologies last for a long time?”
Tarter wrapped up her presentation with a summary of how the SETI Institute has been trying to build a worldwide community to assist in their research. Their primary audience, she said, is college students. “They’re going to be responsible for our technological longevity. They’re going to solve the technical challenges that we’ve presented to them from technologies we’ve previously produced and not used wisely.” One way they have engaged this audience is to publish their code as open source so that it can be improved.
To involve the community beyond universities, SETI Institute is working on a “citizen science” application that will hopefully enable people to find what SETI researchers may have missed by “allowing humans to do what they do best, which is pattern recognition,” Tarter said.
In building the setiQuest community, the institute has also received help from Google, Dell, Intel and Amazon. The setiQuest explorer application is now available as a Web browser app and is also available for free on Android smartphones and tablets. Tarter admitted that the application needs improvement. However, the data they are receiving from the application will eventually allow them to start a new citizen science project with the help of Galaxy Zoo, an organization that allows website visitors to help classify galaxies. This project will feed users data from telescopes in real time to help SETI researchers sift through particularly crowded bands, “where there are so many signals and we can’t figure out where they are,” Tarter said.
During a brief question and answer session following the presentation, Tarter answered a question from an audience member that dealt with what to do in the event of being contacted by another world. In such a scenario, she explained, the first step would be to tell the world what has happened. There is also a piece known as Article 8, which states that Earth will not respond to the message until a global consensus is reached on what the response will be.
She said she was confident, however, that any such correspondence would not be hostile, as any civilization advanced enough to send a message over such a great length, would probably have been around long enough to be peaceful. “I’m a bit of a Polyanna,” she joked.
At today’s upper school meeting, biology teacher Kate Schafer announced that The Harker School would be participating in a study on influenza with Dr. Marcel Salathe, assistant professor of biology at Penn State University and head of the Salathe Group, a start-up research group based at the university.
During the 2009-10 school year, Salathe conducted a study at Harker on how infectious diseases transfer between high school students. Salathe’s work was published in “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,” (PNAS) the official journals of the United States National Academy of Sciences. He received a $1.4 million grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for the upcoming study, which is expected to last between one to one and a half years. The previous study enjoyed a 95% participation rate from the student population, a primary reason Salathe chose Harker again for his research.
“This time around a core group of students will have the opportunity to work directly with Dr. Salathe on ground-breaking research that has the potential to guide the way we understand and manage disease outbreaks,” Schafer said at the meeting. “Students will be working on a variety of different projects, such as investigating the accuracy of rapid influenza tests and looking for bacterial and viral hot spots.”
The process to find students to participate in the project is slated to begin as soon as Oct. 18. Anita Chetty, science department chair, said at the meeting that the entire project will consist of five studies, each led by a lead investigator from grade 11. Under each lead investigator will be a team of students from grades 9-12. Due to the length of the project, only juniors are eligible to be lead investigators, as the seniors will have graduated before the study is complete. Chetty said that more information on the application process for lead investigators would be divulged in Tuesday’s class meetings, and information on the application process for each lead investigator’s team would be available in the coming weeks.
Chetty estimated that the study would begin in earnest in November, “just in time for flu season.”
“We’re very excited about this opportunity and think it reflects the true research community we continue to build here at Harker,” Schafer said.
Over the summer, nearly 30 Harker students participated in internships at a number of different universities and businesses, including Stanford University, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (also known as CERN) and the University of California at Santa Cruz.
Students worked in a wide variety of disciplines. Paulomi Bhattacharya, grade 11, and Jay Reddy, grade 12, worked on nanochemistry projects during their stint at UC Santa Cruz, while senior Shival Dasu, another Santa Cruz intern, helped restore a telescope at the James Lick Observatory. Aranshi Kumar, grade 12, analyzed occurrences of diabetes in Santa Clara County teenagers during his internship at Hunter Labs, and Akshay Ramachandran, grade 12, worked on the development of electroactive polymer materials at Artificial Muscle.
In late August, science department chair Anita Chetty visited Santa Cruz to see several students present on the research they performed during their summer internships. “I was so proud of our students,” she said. “They were poised, eloquent and I felt as though I was listening to graduate students talking about work that had been done over a long period of time.”
On Sat., Oct. 15, several Harker students from grades 11 and 12 will accompany advancement director Joe Rosenthal to Santa Cruz’s Evolutionary Revolutionary event, which will feature several speakers from the university’s science faculty in addition to an audiovisual performance by Symphony Silicon Valley. The event will be held at Cupertino’s Flint Center.
Student Ramya Rangan, grade 12, will head off to Barcelona on Oct. 12 to present at the DREAM6 (Dialogue for Reverse Engineering Assessments and Methods) conference. Rangan will present her research project, titled “Splice Site Discovery Using RNA-Seq Data,” which she completed during a summer stint with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computational Biology group. She will be the only high school student presenting at the conference.
“I’m excited to have the opportunity to practice talking at a real research conference!” Rangan exclaimed. “I’m also excited about being able to share my research with a group of people that can discuss their ideas with me.” She is hopeful that the researchers at the conference, who have performed similar research, will be able to offer help with her future research endeavors.
Distinguished Yale professors Meg Urry and Mark Saltzman appeared at Harker’s upper school campus on Sept. 25 for a special science symposium arranged for students interested in pursuing science in college. Harker’s impressive science background made Nichols Hall an ideal venue for the event. Both professors spoke to the audience about their areas of research at Yale. Saltzman, chair of the department of biomedical engineering, discussed improving methods of medical drug delivery, and Urry, chair of the department of physics, talked about her research of black holes.
The Harker Speaker Series is proud to announce that astronaut Gregory Errol Chamitoff, Ph.D., will be the first speaker for the 2011-12 season, appearing at 7 p.m. at Nichols Hall on the Saratoga campus on Sept. 26. A Montreal native, Chamitoff attended Blackford High School in San Jose, graduated with a bachelor’s in electrical engineering from California Polytechnic State University and has received advanced degrees in multiple engineering disciplines from California Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Houston Clear Lake.
His experience with NASA began in 1985, working on several NASA projects during his stint at MIT, including stability analysis for deployment of the Hubble space telescope, upgrades for the space shuttle’s autopilot function and more. In 1995, when he joined the mission operations team at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Chamitoff led the development of software applications, one of which is the 3-D displays of the International Space Station (ISS) and the space shuttle, which are used by mission control.
After being selected as an astronaut candidate in 1998, Chamitoff spent nine days living and working in the Aquarius undersea laboratory located at the Florida Keys in 2002. His first mission in space was in 2008, serving as the flight engineer and science officer aboard the International Space Station (ISS) for six months. In 2011, he was a crew member on the last flight of the Space Shuttle “Endeavour,” as a mission specialist conducting operations with robotic arms, helping to install a pallet of spare equipment and the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a particle physics observatory that, as his resume states, could one day lead to breakthroughs on human understanding of the universe. In addition, during one of two spacewalks, he helped complete assembly of the ISS and also performed the final spacewalk of the space shuttle program.
The many honors Chamitoff has won over his career include the NASA distinguished service medal, NASA space flight medals, induction into the California Astronaut Hall of Fame and the Technical Excellence Award from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
This article originally appeared in the summer 2011 Harker Quarterly.
Harker has a strong reputation for producing students who excel in math and science. This tradition of success can be traced back to foundations laid in the lower and middle school curricula, which emphasize methods and hands-on learning that open the door to later growth.
These seeds of success are planted early in the youngest Harker students, the kindergarten and grade 1 students. At this level emphasis is placed on defining what science is and what scientists do. So, for three periods a week, kindergarten students are engaged in hands-on projects that, according to Michelle Anderson, who teaches kindergarten science, math, social studies and English, “are more real to kindergarten minds.” Anderson explores essential, introductory themes like “the five senses, the solar system and changes in life cycles.” One of the kids’ favorite sections is focused on life cycles, where the students are
able to observe caterpillars as they develop from their larval stages to their chrysalises and then become butterflies. These broad topics, explored through reading, activities and experiments, lay a structure for later study.
Once students have progressed to grade 2, they begin to enter into more intensive science programs. The students are learning increasingly broader topics, such as measurement (a necessity for any burgeoning scientist), water, the human body, and electricity and magnetism. These topics are taught using the Lawrence Hall of Science’s Foss curriculum, which emphasizes the key principle that science is learned through conducting experiments and understanding concepts in a hands-on manner. Katy Sommer, grade 2 science teacher, notes that Harker students “devote a large amount of time to science, four periods a week, which helps them build strong foundations.”
In grade 5 students have advanced to more complex life science topics. Here students learn about scientific method in detail and spend a substantial amount of time on essential topics such as taxonomy. At this level students continue to be exposed to real-life applications of what they learn in their textbooks. In order to associate theory learned in class into hands-on knowledge, this year’s entire grade 5 class explored the tide pools at the Fitzgerald Marine Reserve in Monterey in April. Catherine Le, grade 5 science teacher, said that her students could find many of the things in tide pools they had just finished learning about in class. Learning the characteristics of the echinoderm phylum becomes more real when a student can hold a sea star and physically observe it.
As the students enter middle school, the fundamental topics and ways of thinking that have been established begin to come into contact with the more complex scientific concepts that will be emphasized in high school and college. In grade 6 experimental design and methods of data gathering are explored through the physical sciences. At the end of the year, students are tasked with designing an experiment, conducting it and interpreting the resulting data. The students then synthesize the information into a poster board presentation.
In grade 8 students conduct three experiments in their biology classes. These experiments utilize tools to explore human physiology, allowing students to measure characteristics like lung capacity and heart rate and also track the student-designated variable of interest.
The general process of designing and conducting experiments becomes more complex as the students move from grade to grade. When considering their progress, Lorna Claerbout, K-8 science department chair, says “the learning spirals as it moves upward. Threads are repeated as students have a higher capacity to understand.”
These repeating threads, with their heavy emphasis on data gathering, critical thinking and pattern recognition, mean that Harker students are consistently recognized as exemplary. At the Synopsys Championship Fair, held March 6-7, Harker students were recognized at many levels for their outstanding work. The middle school students produced more than a half dozen award-winning projects. They were recognized for laudable work in physics, medicine, environmental sciences, biochemistry, botany and zoology subjects for both individual efforts and team submissions.
These results are but the latest in a long line of strong Harker performances in the sciences, and while the high caliber of student cannot be discounted when tracing the roots of their success, we must certainly pay tribute to where they began, in the lower and middle school science classrooms.
The middle school had a lively and informative assembly on Earth Day (April 22), showcasing both students’ knowledge and their care for the environment. The assembly was conducted by the students. Susan Moling, Spanish teacher, said, “it was super inspiring! I’d love more assemblies like this one – where the kids create the content.”
The student-run activities were the highlight of the day: grade 8 students presented Earth Day skits and public service announcements, grade 6 students built solar cookers and baked Earth Day cookies, and everywhere around campus Earth Day posters were on display. All of the activities were themed around environmental consciousness and healthy living.
Scott Kley Contini, grade 8 biology teacher, said the Earth Day assembly was successful. “[The students] amazed me with their level of awareness and inspired me with their creativity,” he said “I feel so lucky to be teaching such talented individuals.”
For more information, contact Lorna Claerbout, K-8 science department chair, at lornac@harker.org.
Despite not doing “anything special to prepare,” said upper school physics teacher Eric Nelson, Harker nonetheless managed to perform impressively in the 2011 Physics Bowl, organized by the American Association of Physics Teachers.
Ashvin Swaminathan, grade 10, was one of the top 10 scorers in his region for the division 2 (advanced) category with a score of 31, nearly 15 points higher than the average score of 16.4. Harker was also one of the highest-scoring schools in its region in the division 2 category, with 130 points.
More than 4,000 students from more than 200 schools in the United States and Canada participated in this year’s competition, which also had participants from China, Japan and Korea.
Radio host Sam Van Zandt of KBAY came to Harker prior to the Synopsys Championship Fair to talk to Harker students about their projects. Listen to the interviews here!
Harker once again won a host of awards at this year’s Synopsys Championship Fair, held March 6-7. Two upper school students, Revanth Kosaraju, grade 11 (“A Novel Perfusion-Based Protocol for Decellularization of Adipose Tissue on a Bioreactor”) and Vikas Bhetanabhotla , grade 9 (“A Theoretical Study of Factors Affecting Molecular Specificity in Hyperpolarized MRI Scans”) both won grand prizes and eligibility for the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. Bhetanabhotla, a member of the research club, was mentored by Kosaraju.
Harker had many more winners in several different categories at the fair at the high school level. In physics, Prag Batra, grade 11, won a $75 special award and certificate from Varian Medical Systems and a $400 team award from the Genencor Biotechnology Awards along with partner Govinda Dasu, grade 11, who also won the Varian Medical Systems special award. In addition to his grand prize, Bhetanabhotla also won a First Award for individual project in the physics category and certificate of achievement from the NASA-Ames Research Center, which included a VIP visit to the facilities. Varun Mohan, grade 9, earned a $100 prize and a certificate from Trimble Navigation, while Avinash Nayak, grade 9, took home a PW460t digital camera from Hewlett-Packard and a second place award with a $75 cash prize and certificate from the Society for the Advancement of Material and Process Engineering. Christopher Sund and Ravi Tadinada, both grade 10, each won First Awards.
Paulomi Bhattacharya, grade 10, was Harker’s biggest winner in Environmental Sciences, winning a First Award for individual project, a Certificate of Achievement from the NASA-Ames Research Center with a VIP visit, a certificate and medallion from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and a $50 gift certificate and Certificate of Achievement from the United States Navy and Marine Corps. Zareen Choudhury, grade 9, received an Honorable Mention for her individual project. Payal Modi, grade 10, received the third place award high school award and a $25 prize from the American Society of Civil Engineers, and Daniel Ryan Pak, grade 9, received a certificate of achievement in the Stockholm Junior Water Prize contest, as well as a chance to move on to the competition in Stockholm, Sweden.
In chemistry, Shreya Nathan, grade 12, won a First Award for individual project, a third place $25 prize and certificate from the Society of Vacuum Coaters, a third place award and $100 prize from the Santa Clara Valley local section of the American Chemical Society and a second place award of $75 from the Santa Clara Valley chapter of A Society for Materials (ASM). Suchita Nety, grade 10, earned a Second Award for individual project, a $50 prize from the San Jose State University from the Student Affiliates of the American Chemical Society and a first place $100 award and certificate from the Society for the Advancement of Material and Process Engineering. Pooja Shah, grade 10, received an Honorable Mention Award and certificate from the ASM Santa Clara Valley chapter.
Winners in the medicine/health/gerontology category included Lucy Cheng and Ramya Rangan, both grade 11, who received an honorable mention for team project, Varun Gudapati, grade 10, who earned an honorable mention for individual project, and Anika Radiya-Dixit, grade 10, winner of a Second Award for individual project.
Frederic Enea, grade 11, took home a Second Award for individual project in the engineering category, along with a certificate of achievement from the United States Army. Other engineering winners were Divyahans Gupta, grade 9, who received a certificate of achievement from Mu Alpha Theta; Vikram Sundar, grade 9, earning a Second Award for individual project as well as a $100 first prize award from Morgan Lewis; and Kiran Vodrahalli, grade 12, who won a First Award for individual project, a $100 first place high school award from the Northern California chapter of the American Vacuum Society, a $50 check and certificate from the Wireless Communications Alliance, a prize package from the United States Air Force (which included a certificate, charging stand, computer backpack and more) and the IEEE Award for Electro-Technology from the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers.
Harker had two winners in the biochemistry/microbiology category. Anika Gupta, grade 9, won a Second Award for individual project, while, in addition to his grand prize, Kosaraju earned a First Award for individual project and was a finalist for the Synopsys Outreach Foundation’s n+1 Prize.
In botany, Claudia Tischer, grade 9, received a Second Award for individual project, and in computers/mathematics, Rahul Sridhar, grade 9, won a First Award for individual project, a $75 award and certificate from Varian Medical Systems and a $100 first prize from Morgan Lewis. Abhinav Khanna, grade 11, received a First Award for individual project in the behavioral/social category.
At the middle school level, Sneha Behtanabhotla, grade 6, won a First Award for individual project in the physics category, as well as a certificate of achievement from the Ricoh Corporation and a grades 6-8 certificate of achievement and Office of Naval Research medallion from the United States Navy and Marine Corps. Also in physics, Rishabh Jain and Neil Movva, both grade 8, were given a Second Award for team project, a certificate of achievement from the NASA-Ames Research Center and a VIP visit, and grades 6-8 second place award, with a $75 prize from the Santa Clara Valley chapter of A Society for Materials.
Nikash Shankar, grade 8, came up big in the medicine/health/gerontology category, taking home a First Award for individual project, an Isabelle Stone Award for Best Biological Science Projects, and a Santa Clara Valley Science and Engineering Fair Association Board of Directors Award (Middle School), which included a trip to the state science fair and a $100 cash prize. Classmate Sriram Somasundaram was also a winner in this category, earning a First Award for individual project.
In environmental sciences, eighth grader Vineet Kosaraju received an honorable mention for individual project, a grade 6-9 second place award with a $50 cash prize from the Society of Vacuum Coaters and a first place award from the Society for the Advancement of Material and Process Engineering, which included a $100 cash prize and a framed certificate.
Andrew Jin and Stanley Xie, both grade 8, took home the First Award for team project in the biochemistry/microbiology category. Classmate Pranav Reddy, meanwhile, won a First Award for individual project, as did Steven Wang, another grade 8 student, who also earned a first place award for grades 6-9, which included a $75 cash prize and a certificate from the Society of Vacuum Coaters.
Samyukta Yagat, grade 8, won a First Award for individual project in botany, where Archana Podury, also grade 8, received an Honorable Mention for individual project.
Sixth grader Amrita Singh earned a Second Award for individual project in the zoology category and also won a second place award from the Northern California branch of the American Association for Laboratory Animal Science, which included a certificate and a $125 cash prize.
Special credit goes to upper school science teachers Richard Barber and Chris Spenner and middle school science teachers Lorna Claerbout, Ilona Davies, Scott Kley Contini, Benjamin Morgensen, Daniel Sommer and Raji Swaminathan, who were all instrumental in Harker’s success this year.