Jan. 12, 2011
Harker set a new California record for Intel Science Talent Search semifinalists on Jan. 12, with seven students being named at a special morning assembly.
The students – Roshni Bhatnagar, Josephine Chen, Benjamin Chen, Rohan Mahajan, Nikhil Parthasarathy, Susan Tu and Jason Young, all grade 12 – were each awarded a $1,000 prize and have a chance to travel to Washington, D.C., in March for the final competition. The first place winner will receive a $100,000 grand prize.
Projects ranged from researching optical coatings for telescope lenses to comparisons of distant galaxies to those more proximate. Each student partnered with university-level mentors to perform the research for his or her project. Most students also had a Harker mentor to help the students write and finalize the project. Bhatnagar worked with Nicole Giuliani, a doctoral candidate at Stanford University. Her Harker mentor was Savitha Sastry, upper school biology teacher. Dr. Sophie Kusy, postdoctoral research fellow, and Joel Dudley, bioinformatics specialist, both from Stanford, worked together with Josephine Chen, whose Harker mentor was Anita Chetty, science department chair.
Benjamin Chen was mentored by Dr. Raja Guhathakurta, professor at UC Santa Cruz’s department of astronomy and astrophysics, and Dr. Evan Kirby, a postdoctoral scholar at CalTech. Chris Spenner, upper school physics teacher, acted as his Harker mentor. Mahajan completed his project with Dr. Yat Li, assistant professor of chemistry at UC Santa Cruz and was mentored at Harker by Mala Raghavan, upper school chemistry teacher.
Parthasarathy was mentored by Dr. Sandy Faber, professor of astronomy at UC Santa Cruz and mother of Harker alumna Holly Faber MS ’89, and Dr. Kamson Lai, postdoctoral scholar at UCSC’s department of astrophysics. Lick Observatory’s David Hilyard, optician, Brian Dupraw, optician, and Dr. Andrew Philips, astronomy researcher, acted as Tu’s mentors. Her Harker mentor was Dr. Mark Brada, upper school physics teacher. Jason Young completed his project with mentorship from Dr. Wei Wang, assistant professor of chemistry and biochemistry and UC San Diego and was mentored at Harker by Dr. Matthew Harley, upper school biology teacher. Finalists will be announced in two weeks.
In October, Jacqueline Wang, grade 10, was named a regional finalist for this year’s Siemens Competition. Harker regional semifinalists were Roshni Bhatnagar, Rohan Mahajan, Nikhil Parthasarathy and Supraja Swamy, all grade 12.
Each Harker student entering the competition worked with a mentor to do research for their projects. Parthasarathy, for instance, worked with Dr. Sandra Faber, mother of Holly Faber MS ’89, and Wang collaborated with a mentor from Stanford University.
More than 2,000 students from 36 states participated in this year’s Siemens Competition. Of those, 312 became regional semifinalists, and were regional finalists. The mentorships were set up through Harker’s internship program, which is coordinated by Anita Chetty, science department chair. “The entire science department shares in this great achievement,” Chetty said.
This story was originally published in the Fall 2010 issue of Harker Quarterly
For the fourth year in a row, Harker students claimed regional recognition in eCYBERMISSION’s national competition, receiving monetary awards totaling $18,000 between the two teams. One team also received an all-expenses-paid trip to the National Judging and Educational Event in Baltimore, Md., on June 21-26 to present their final project to four army officials and teachers from the United States Military Academy at West Point.
A competition challenging students in grades six to nine to use science, math and technology to solve real community issues, eCYBERMISSION encourages students to research and conduct experiments to find a solution. While “Dust Busters,” Allen Cheng, Daniel Pak, Albert Chu and Sharon Babu, now all grade 9, did not place nationally in Baltimore, the team had the opportunity to meet with all regional winners and explore the two Smithsonian museums and Aberdeen Proving Ground, home of the U.S. Army Research, Development and Engineering Command.
The “Dust Busters’” presentation was the culmination of a year’s worth of research on a community controversy two students initially read about in the town newspaper related to mercury dust emissions from Lehigh Hanson Cement Plant.
Before submitting their project online in February, the quartet spent five months collecting water from four different bodies of water, testing for emissions in the lab and compiling data to research ways to educate the residents about the pollution and possible health issues. They also interviewed Hanson Quarry to hear the company’s side of the story.
The “Dust Busters” discovered that, while the local cement plant was not in violation of the current U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regulations, the mercury level in water near the quarry was significantly higher than mercury levels in other bodies of water in the area. The students took their findings to the Cupertino City Council and created a pamphlet that was distributed door-to-door to residents.
“This project needs students who have good research skills, writing skills, data collection and analysis and public relations skills to help them interview experts in the field that they are working on,” Vandana Kadam, advisor and math teacher, said about the group’s dynamic. “This team had a good combination of these qualities and hence worked very well together.”
The “Analytic Trio,” now also in grade 9, were Vikas Bhetanabhotla, Divyahans Gupta and Brian Tuan. They also received high honors and were recognized for their project’s application of science, math and technology. After experimenting with six different designs, the “Analytic Trio” presented a gas nozzle prototype that emits a lower amount of volatile organic compounds (VOC) into the environment than the current nozzle used across the nation.
“We are extremely proud of the students from The Harker School for their creative and innovative use of outstanding research, experimentation and analysis during this year’s eCYBERMISSION competition,” Major General Nick G. Justice said. “These students were selected from thousands of their peers, not only for their potential as future leaders in STEM [science, technology, engineering, math], but for their work to improve and make a positive impact on the communities in which they live.”
The third year of the Gallon Jug Contest saw another collection of creative entries from grade 4 and 5 students. The contest is a math class challenge requiring students to create gallon guys, gallon gals, animals and other objects using divisions of a gallon (such as four quarts, eight pints and so on). Winners were separated into two categories, one for creativity and one for functionality, or how well the creation showed the relationship between the measurements. This year’s winners, all grade 4, are: Compass, Henry Wong; Native American Girl, Alexandra Lu; Harker Eagle, Nikhil Dharmaraj; Caterpillar, Ally Wang.
In June, a paper co-authored by James Seifert, grade 12, was accepted to the chemistry journal Angewandte Chemie. Recognized as the top chemistry journal, Angewandte Chemie accepts fewer than five percent of the papers that are submitted for publication.
The study, titled “Amphiphilic Self-Assembly of an n-Type Nanotube,” which was completed while Seifert worked in the chemistry department at Ohio State University, has been published online (purchase required) and will appear as a cover story in the November hard copy edition of the journal. For the project, Seifert worked with graduate student Hui Shao in preparing compounds that were used to conduct the research. “The work in the paper actually involves three research groups from two universities,” said Dr. Jon Parquette, professor of chemistry at Ohio State. “However, Hui and James made the initial discoveries that were further investigated by these groups.”
Recently, the article was featured by the online chemistry magazine ChemViews.
This story was originally published in the Fall 2010 issue of Harker Quarterly Harker junior Margaret Krackeler signed up to get a course out of the way and found she liked it.
“The teachers are really fun and I’m there with my friends,” she said during the final week. As a bonus, she was able to enter AP Biology this fall, skipping the otherwise-required year of Honors Biology.
Chris Florio, Summer Institute principal, said that most students enroll in the Institute as a result of academic planning: either to knock off a required course or to get ahead in a subject area of interest. Many classes are in core subjects, but enrichment courses are also offered in art, forensics and even driver’s education.
Honors Geometry teacher Misael Fisico revealed how he captures students’ attention as they face the prospect of fourplus hours of geometry daily. “I know my students are into computers,” he said, “so there are always computer activities in my class, especially for the first two weeks. Then, I let them do the thinking once I’ve bombarded them with the fun stuff!”
Computer science teacher Susan King noted that, while many students take programming to complete academic requirements, “it isn’t all that rare for kids to find out they like it and go on to take the AP course as a result.” Like Fisico, King works hard to make her instruction and classwork relevant and fun.
“I try not to be the sage on the stage,” she said, “but to have the kids be very active – not only programming on their computers, but also writing on the white boards and working in teams of two.”
It’s not all fun and games for sure, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any: King and her teaching assistant, Partha Vora, grade 11, put on a version of “The Dating Game” in the Advanced Programming class to illustrate the operation of data structures.
Data structures can represent many, many data points, explained King, “or just three pieces of information, like Bachelors One, Two and Three.” In the game, “the bachelorette could question the bachelors but she had to use the correct index,” she said. “If she rejected one, she removed that bachelor from the database, using all the appropriate concepts.”
Prag Batra, grade 11, got to the crux of the matter: “It’s kind of frustrating when it’s not working, and you have to spend all this time debugging. But thinking of the idea and trying to come up with the logic is kind of fun,” he said.
This story was originally published in the Fall 2010 issue of Harker Quarterly More than one hundred international students this summer sought out Harker’s well-established English Language Institute (ELI) to bolster their English skills and their academic prospects in the United States.
The ELI students, aged six to 16, came primarily from Asia, but a variety of continents were represented with students attending from such diverse countries as Russia, Bolivia, Brazil and Ethiopia.
According to ELI director Anthony Wood, many students come to the program to increase their chances of admission to college preparatory boarding schools in the U.S. A few have been “admitted conditionally and referred to the program by their admissions directors,” he said.
As a mature program ELI provides a good look at U.S. and California culture. While the focus is on learning English, cultural adventures this year included visits to the Roaring Camp Railroad in the Santa Cruz Mountains, the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, the San Jose Tech Museum and the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
While in the Monterey area, the group stopped at the Carmel Mission for some historical context on California’s development. U.S. history was integrated into the curriculum to give students moving on to American schools a good background for learning more about the U.S.
This year Jared Ramsey, Harker lower school history teacher, taught a specialized curriculum introducing major events that have shaped the U.S. “He added great variety and expertise to our program,” said Wood, “and the students really enjoyed his creative teaching methods.”
The students also enjoyed ELI’s enrichment program, in which they continued learning after 3:30 through activities. The younger students swam and played games. On Mondays and Fridays they joined the summer camp program at Bucknall.
“It’s an opportunity for the kids to immerse themselves with American kids who speak English as their first language,” said Wood.
The most advanced students, usually aged 14-16, stayed at the Saratoga campus and worked on special projects tailored to their needs. For many, that meant SAT preparation. They were assisted by mentors (sometimes called buddies), often Harker juniors, seniors or recent graduates.
Teacher Lyle Davidson said ELI students arrive with a pretty good understanding of grammar, but they often need help in other areas. “The SAT asks very tricky questions in reading comprehension,” he explained. “Buddies … are able to take a teaching role and model how they would confront the problem – and they do it all in English.”
Mentor Brian Lee, a 2010 Harker graduate, said he really enjoyed hanging out with the students. They talk about music a lot, he said, and, with the natural curiosity of young people, “they ask questions about our personal lives, like where we come from.”
The school days were long, but Huu Li, from Vietnam, said his teacher made the time fly. “He’s very funny. He knows how to make the students feel happy and never feel tired when we study.”
Anne West, grade 12, is featured in a front-page article in the Oct. 1 edition of The Wall Street Journal that chronicles her mission to analyze her family’s genome. John, Anne’s father, had the family’s genome sequenced last year after being diagnosed with a pulmonary embolism in 2003. However, the resulting mass of raw data presented the Wests with the problem of compiling the information into something they could interpret.
Nathan Pearson, director of research for Knome, Inc., a personal genomics company, is quoted in the Journal piece as saying, “If you got an auctioneer to read out loud someone’s genome at six letters every second, it would take 34 years to finish.”
Using her family’s computer, Anne West decided to take on the monumental task of boiling down the data, a job typically reserved for large teams of scientists with highly advanced degrees. West, who has had a passion for biology since grade 5, has been using a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet to decipher the data.
According to the Journal, the work is daunting but rewarding. West spent six months decoding just one of 20,000 genes, but her work has led to some big opportunities, such as her summer stint in the laboratory of Harvard and MIT scientist George Church. In April, she was a speaker at the Genomes, Environments, Traits (GET) Conference in Boston, where she received business cards from scientists in the field. She is also working with researchers in Seattle on a paper that is partly based on the Wests’ genome, and in September traveled to a genomics conference in Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y., where she appeared as a panelist.
West thanked her science teachers at Harker, saying they played a large part in fostering the love of biology that has led her to this point. She credited Catherine Le, grade 5 science teacher, for sparking her initial decision to pursue biology; Scott Kley Contini, middle school science teacher, for his “rigorous course”; and Gary Blickenstaff, upper school biology teacher, who assisted her with the project and helped with her presentations at the Personal Genomes Conference and the GET Conference. “I’ve worked hard and of my own motivation, but it was never in isolation nor without help,” she said.
Vikas Bhetanabhotla, who starts Gr. 9 in the fall, won first place in the aerodynamics and hydrodynamics category at the California State Science Fair (CSSF) in May. Vikas’ project, “A Study of Magnetohydrodynamic Propulsion and Dimensionless Numbers,” earned him a medal and a $250 prize.
Vikas’ trip to the fair was assured in March at the Synopsys Championship, where he also won a first place award. He made adjustments to his projects during the time between the Synopsys event and the CSSF. At the fair Vikas was interviewed for four hours by 14 judges. His mother, Padmasri Behtanabhotla, said,“Every one of them was very appreciative of the amount of work he had done, his analysis and in-depth understanding of the subject.”
[Update] Riya Chandra has been named a top 10 national finalist in the Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist Challenge! She traveled to New York in early October to participate in live science challenges and though she did not win, received a $1,ooo consolation prize.
[Posted Aug. 4 2010]
Incoming student Riya Chandra, who will start Gr. 6 this fall, was recently named a state semifinalist in this year’s Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist challenge. Chandra received a $250 cash prize and a special plaque to honor her achievement. In addition, the budding scientist’s work was featured in a story in the Tri-City Voice newspaper which serves cities in southern Alameda County. The top 10 national finalists, who will travel to the finals in New York City in October, are set to be announced this month. Founded in 1999, the competition accepts video presentations on various topics from students in grades 5 through 8 located throughout the country. Chandra’s project discussed germs and disease prevention.
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