The Nichols Hall atrium was the setting for a confluence of art and science at Harker’s fourth annual science research symposium, New Frontiers, in mid-March. Over 300 attendees enjoyed breakfast, The Science of Art display in the upstairs gallery and music by the Harker String Quartet while viewing student presentations on site and streamed via the Internet.
All told, there were 37 MS and US presentations, 22 student papers, two alumni presenters from the class of 2004 and two keynote speakers.
With enthusiasm and confidence, students presented their work and answered questions from both guests and each other. Vikram Sundar, Gr. 7, sought out faculty mentor Rajasree Swaminathan, MS science teacher, and the Science Research Club to support his look at the use of capacitors to provide a steady current to charge solar lithium-ion batteries. “Research is a lot of fun,” Sundar said. “You can make it your own.”
“Kids argue logic and reasoning with one another, and challenge each other to do better and better,” said Huali G. Chai, mother of Siemens semifinalist Andrew Stanek, Gr. 12.
Papers were given on topics ranging from a survey of insect pollinator biodiversity on plants in Costa Rica to the activation of two proteins by airborne particulates relative to lung damage.
Emily Carr, Gr. 12, credited her faculty mentor, biology teacher Kate Schafer, with inspiring her to take Harker’s research class and develop her work on the effect of estrogens on sea urchins. “The class was terrific and Harker was very supportive,” Carr said.
Intel finalist Denzil Sikka, Gr. 12, credited Harker’s research class with the opportunity and support to develop a new algorithm for aligning large data sets. “Harker teachers are really open,” she said. “As long as you are willing to put in the work, they are willing to support you.”
Senior Dominique Dabija found a summer internship at Stanford University to develop her program that makes it easier to visualize the way a signal travels in a protein, and its effect on amino acids. She is also a member of Harker’s Women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (WiSTEM) club, conducted the symposium’s CSI: Harker workshop, and was an Intel and Siemens semifinalist.
From afar, alumni Alfred Pokmeng See ’04, Johns Hopkins University, and Nikhil Deshmukh ’04, Princeton University, each led interactive videoconference sessions on their work with malignant brain tumors and neural activity in spatial navigation, respectively. This year’s event also featured two keynote speakers. Nimet Maherali, Ph.D. candidate at Har vard University Center for Regenerative Medicine and Cancer, spoke about “Cellular Alchemy and the Making of a Research Scientist.” Dr. Andrew Chan, senior vice president of immunology and antibody engineering at Genentech, addressed guests regarding “Science, Biotechnology and Medicine in the 21st Centur y.” Sponsors for this year’s event were Roche, Fortebio, Hunter Labs, Nanosyn, Pearl Therapeutics, Relypsa and Health Hero Network/Bosch.
The symposium was established by Anita Chetty, science department chair, as an opportunity for students to enter research competitions and share their work prior to graduation, and for alumni and other research leaders to link lab work with real world applications and careers. Alumnus Deshmukh noted, “I think it’s fair to say that the majority of my peers in graduate school did not even know what research was until junior or senior year of college; to have such an experience as a high school student can make a huge difference.”
Cal Tech student Aarathi Minisandram ’08 credits Chetty with helping her solidify her interest in pre-med. “The symposium is amazing,” she said. “The upper school resources are better than most colleges and the variety of science courses helped me broaden my horizons.” Minisandram ser ved as WiSTEM co-president when at Harker. “You see companies here and they are really interested in our work,” said Minisandram.
Chetty expressed her delight in the completion of Nichols Hall, which brings together all the sciences in one location and promotes the sharing of knowledge. “Thank you for making my dreams come true,” Chetty said as she expressed appreciation to the students, parents, mentors and faculty for their passion and patience, along with alumni who represent Harker and return to share. She also thanked the administration and lifetime trustee Diana Nichols for their support. Looking ahead, Chetty hopes to increase opportunities for students to find mentors, and expand the event to include students from schools across the country. She is also considering videoconferencing with sister schools in Australia and Switzerland. Next year’s symposium will be held on March 20, 2010.
One Harker alumnus has leveraged his middle school science experiment to create a delicious wine. Will Jarvis MS’97, while boarding at Harker, received special dispensation to conduct a wine making experiment for his science class. This spring, Jarvis Winery (a family business), will release a wine based on the experiment. Jarvis, now attending Stanford business school, wasn’t able to sample the wine until he came of age nearly 10 years later.
After aging, the experimental wine was bottled and stored at the winery. When he and his family did open the bottles, they were excited enough about the flavor to call in their resident wine expert, who pronounced the wine exceptional. “I wasn’t really sure what to expect,” said Jarvis when he stopped by to help celebrate the opening of the Ringold Research Laboratory in Nichols Hall in February. “It was mostly conceived as a science experiment, so it wasn’t until later, when we actually tasted the wine, that we actually started to get excited about the quality.” That led to Jarvis’ second attempt to make wine. “Because it was inspired by the science project we decided to name it the Will Jarvis Science Project,” he said. Since college, Jarvis has been involved in wine making. “I have cycled through different positions at the winery,” he noted. “I did a summer working in the fields, a summer in shipping, I’ve done accounting and led tours for a summer; so I made my rounds through the winery, but this is my only personal attempt at wine making since Harker.”
Jarvis recalled the fuss around his original batch, which was in a seven- or eight-gallon cask, compared to the usual 60- gallon barrel. “There was a lot of excitement surrounding the experiment, given it was a fairly unusual project in that I was a 13- or 14-year-old middle school student making wine in my dorm room. Things were pretty compact so there wasn’t anywhere for me to put the barrel except the foot of my bed. That’s what I remember the most: having to live around the barrel, sort of negotiating my living space. Surprisingly enough, as far as I know, no one dipped into the keg – there weren’t any unauthorized wine tastings.”
Now, the new half-barrel (30- gallon) vintage, approved by the winery’s expert, is ready for sale. “We happened upon the quality of the smaller barrel serendipitously, through the science experiment,” said Jarvis, “but it makes a lot of sense because during wine making there is a well known trade-off during aging between absorbing a lot of the desirable oak-y flavors form the barrel, and losing some of the natural fruity flavor of the wine, which is also desirable. That (trade-off) just seems to be a function of time.
“The idea with the smaller-sized barrel, which has a higher surface to volume ratio, is that you absorb the oak at an accelerated rate so you don’t need to age the wine as long in order to absorb the same amount of oak flavor. The end result is that you are ageing the wine for a shorter amount of time in the barrel before you bottle it (and) when you bottle it you are essentially capturing (the flavor at that moment). People have used smaller barrels for experimental purposes before, but we are almost certainly the first winery to try that on a production scale.” Read more about Will Jarvis and his Science Experiment in the June Alumni News!
Six Harker seniors — Dominque Dabija, Daniel Kim, Elena Madan, Anand Natarajan, Vikram Nathan, and Denzil Sikka — have been named semifinalists in Intel’s Science Talent Search. This represents the highest number of semifinalists a single California school has produced since the contest began.
The students each received $1,000 for this milestone, and are now eligible to win the $100,000 grand prize.
There were only 25 semifinalists in California, out of 300 nationwide. Over 1,600 students submitted entries. Harker winners’ research covered a wide array of subjects, from “Computational Methods for Identifying Functionally Important Residues Involved in Allosteric Communication Pathways” (Dabija’s) to “Novel Quantitative Models of Reaction Kinetics” (Nathan’s). In 2006, Harker’s Yi Sun (’06) went on to the nationals, taking second place and winning $75,000.
The Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology has announced its 2008-09 semifinalists, and Harker has a total of six, one of only two schools on the West Coast to have that many, and the only one in Northern California. Congratulations to Rahul Ahuja, Dominique Dabija, Elena Madan, Vikram Nathan, Nikhil Raghuram and Andrew Stanek, all Gr. 12.
Harker had the highest percentage of semifinalists from among all the schools in California, with twice the number per class size as the second and third schools.
The Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology is designed to recognize talent early on and foster individual growth through science research. It is administered by The College Board and funded by the Siemens Foundation.
Student projects are judged on creativity, field knowledge, comprehensiveness, interpretation, literature review (source citation), scientific importance, future work (follow-up or applications), clarity of expression and presentation. About 300 projects nationwide were chosen as semifinalists. After that, up to thirty students and thirty teams are chosen to compete at six regional competitions. Harker began submitting projects to this competition in 2005-06, and had one semifinalist that inaugural year. In both 2006-07 and 2007-08, Harker fielded four semifinalists.