Last month, seniors Harsh Deep, Rishab Parthasarathy and William Zhao and juniors Jeremy Ko and Nicholas Wei took second place out of 30 teams at Virtual Regional Science Bowl, held at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. The team lost a close round to Lynbrook, by the points equivalent of a single question.
This yearly competition, held by the U.S. Department of Energy, has students answering questions from a variety of fields, including chemistry, biology, physics and math. Harker also took second place at last year’s event.
Six Harker seniors have been named top 300 scholars in the 2022 Regeneron Science Talent Search, the most for any California school. Alice Feng, Alex Hu, Rishab Parthasarathy, Sasvath Ramachandran, Aimee Wang and Emily Zhou were among 300 high school seniors selected from 1,804 entries received in this year’s competition. Each submitted original research projects that were the result of months of work.
“In a year where our students, as juniors, had few opportunities to conduct research, they persevered, letting their curiosity and dedication overcome all the challenges of our uncertain times,” said Anita Chetty, science department chair.
Each of the scholars will receive a cash award of $2,000, and each school with a student scholar will be awarded $2,000 to fund STEM programs. On Jan. 20, 40 of the top 300 scholars will be named finalists, who will then participate in the final stage of the competition, which takes place March 10-16.
Last week, two manuscripts co-authored by Simar Bajaj ‘20 were published in medical journals Nature Medicine and The Lancet. The Nature Medicine piece covered the widespread attempts to suppress voting rights and why medical professionals “champion patients’ right to vote to protect health and deracinate inequitable medical practices, building on the efforts of organizations such as Vot-ER and VoteHealth 2020.” The piece, by Bajaj and co-authors and medical doctors Alister Francois Martin and Fatima Cody Stanford, details why protecting voting rights is a health issue and therefore needs the support of health care professionals.
For The Lancet, Bajaj, Dr. Stanford and Lucy Tu published a piece on the historical and continued racism and misogyny faced by Black women medical professionals, including the outsized scrutiny and expectations placed upon them. “Black women physicians are simultaneously considered superhuman, but never enough. We suggest this double bind leads to a sense of disquietude as Black women’s identity conflicts with their success,” the authors argue. They go on to express support for measures such as implementing diversity, equity and inclusion work as a requirement for promotion.
Earlier this month, the Harker Research Club hosted a panel with Vikas Bhetanabhotla ‘14, Cynthia Chen ‘20, Anastasiya Grebin ‘18 and Ruhi Sayana ‘19, who spoke about their post-high school careers and offered advice on how to find research opportunities.
The panelists each shared what they had done after graduating from Harker and how the research they conducted as Harker students helped shape their current work. At Harker, Sayana, who currently works in a lab at Stanford University studying neurodegenerative diseases, had a significant interest in pediatric oncology before becoming interested in genetics. “When I was applying to labs at Stanford, I was trying to look at something at the intersection of pediatric disease and genetics, and that’s how I ended up at the lab that I am now,” she said. “So [my work at Harker] definitely informed it.”
Bhetanabhotla, who graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 2018 and now works at Palo Alto Networks, was heavily interested in machine learning. “My research was the intersection of cosmology with machine learning, so that research experience with machine learning really guided my interests through college,” he said. This carried through to his post-college career, as machine learning is now a part of his work at Palo Alto Networks
“In high school pretty much all of my research was wet lab, and I jumped around a lot,” said Grebin. “I did some plant science. I did some data set analysis for cancer mutations.” As a sophomore, she participated in a directed evolution project that “didn’t pan out,” but she now attends CalTech, “which is the place where directed evolution was essentially invented,” and her work now incorporates directed evolution to create viral constructs.
Most of Chen’s projects at Harker were in bioinformatics, which incorporated biology and computer science. Her work in that area earned her a spot as a finalist in the 2020 Regeneron Science Talent Search. She is now attending Harvard University and works in a lab at MIT, doing research to learn how to better explain how artificial intelligence models work. “I think the projects [I worked on at Harker] gave me a good starting point for figuring out what I wanted to explore further in college,” she said.
The panelists also offered advice on how to find research opportunities in high school. “It’s all about casting a wide net,” Bhetanabhotla said. “I knew I was interested in the astronomy area a little bit but I was also interested in biology potentially so I just emailed a lot of different professors.”
Sayana agreed. “You’re in high school,” she said. “This is the time to explore as much as you can, and if you’re reaching out to labs there’s a very high chance that a lot of people won’t respond to you, so the wider out you go, the better chance you’re going to have at getting a response.”
Chen recommended the approach of emailing research labs that seemed potentially interesting or open to taking on high school students, “because I didn’t really know specifically what I wanted to do in terms of research in high school because you’re exposed to so many different subjects.”
Grebin did much of her research in high school at Harker after school. “I kind of advocate for that path for at least the first couple of years before you decide to move on to working in a lab and doing slightly more in-depth research,” she said. “Simply because you have so much more ability to pick what you want to do. I miss being able to pick the project that I want to work on as an undergraduate.”
Harker students took top spots in the 2021 TEAMS (Tests of Engineering Aptitude, Mathematics and Science) competition, in which teams of students collaborate to solve real-world engineering problems. This year, TEAMS dispensed with a national finals event and issued scores based on state-level results.
Harker’s 11/12A team – juniors Harsh Deep, Alex Hu, Sasvath Ramachandran and Kailash Ranganathan – placed third nationally after taking first in California. Meanwhile, team 9/10A – sophomores Brian Chen, Riya Gupta, Stephen Xia and Sally Zhu – placed sixth in the nation overall.
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.”
Raji Swaminathan, middle school science teacher, recently published the third book in her series about the elements, titled “The Halogens – Oh, So Reactive!” As with the previous two books, this book follows Atom and her dog, Electron, as they travel to visit the elements via a magic periodic table. The book is currently available to purchase through Amazon and will be available to download for free on April 5-6. The second book in the series will be available for free March 25-28 and April 5-6. Swaminathan’s other two books, “Hydrogen and the Alkali Metals” and “My Basketball Game – A Lesson about Accuracy and Precision,” are available as free downloads through Apple Books.
Last week, Simar Bajaj ‘20 gave a presentation to Harker students to expand on the points made in an essay he co-wrote that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in January. In the piece, he and Dr. Fatima Stanford argue that distrust of COVID-19 vaccinations among Black Americans is the result of decades of systemic racism built into the medical profession, and that too much attention is focused on well-known incidents such as the Tuskegee syphilis study to explain hesitancy among Black Americans to accept the vaccines.
While the horrors of these incidents should not be forgotten, Bajaj said, “you know what challenges you’re facing through the health care institution if you’re a Black individual, especially during this pandemic, which has highlighted a lot of inequities.” Many studies have shown that Black patients are misdiagnosed and are refused treatment and painkillers at much higher rates.
“If you are a Black man in the emergency department and the doctor … is not giving you your painkillers, even though you’re visibly in pain,” Bajaj said. “In those moments … perhaps you are thinking about Tuskegee and historicizing your frustrations there, but perhaps more likely you are thinking about the racist doctor that’s not giving you your painkillers.”
Bajaj said an approach known as “barbershop-based intervention” could help build trust among Black Americans. These interactions, in which Black patients are cared for by Black health care professionals, provide racial concordance that has had very positive outcomes. In one study, barbershop-based intervention brought the blood pressure of 64 percent of Black men to normal levels, compared to just 12 percent of the control group who continued to visit their primary physician. “Barbershops are often forums of camaraderie for Black individuals,” Bajaj said. “There’s this relationship between the barber and those getting their hair cut that is very close.”
He also cited research performed by Dr. Stanford that demonstrated an increased interest in seeking information when COVID prevention messages were delivered by Black physicians. “There’s a lot of information being thrown at us during the pandemic, a lot of which is incredibly important to understand and lot of which can impact health literacy,” Bajaj said. “So you can see the implications here.”
Lay press coverage that zeroes in on Tuskegee and other historical atrocities, Bajaj said, can also further the damaging idea that racism in medicine is mostly in the past. “I found it incredibly frustrating when I would read these lay press articles where they’d try to [explain that] Black individuals don’t trust the vaccine because of Tuskegee or because of J. Marion Sims or because of this or that,” he said. “And I thought such a framing is incorrect and harmful.”
Simar Bajaj ‘20, now in his first year at Harvard, was recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the most prestigious peer-reviewed medical journals. His piece, co-authored with Fatima Stanford, a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, examines the relationship between systemic racism and the reluctance in Black communities to accept COVID-19 vaccines. Reasons cited include the persistence of wrong diagnoses and denial of necessary treatment for Black Americans. The article also proposes that Black health experts be the directors of messaging to Black communities to increase trust of the vaccine.
Today, the Society for Science & the Public announced that seniors Shray Alag, Saloni Shah, Aditya Tadimeti and Sidra Xu were named four of the top 300 scholars in the 2021 Regeneron Science Talent Search. Nearly 1,800 applications from 611 high schools were submitted for this year’s competition. Each of the 300 scholars will be awarded a $2,000 cash prize, and their schools will receive a $2,000 prize for each scholar to fund STEM-related education. This year’s top 40 finalists will be announced Jan. 21.