Harker students had another great year in the Technology Student Association’s annual TEAMS (Tests of Engineering, Aptitude, Mathematics and Science) competition, with four teams taking top spots in California. The team of freshmen Rohan Bhowmik, Brian Chen, Riya Gupta, Nicholas Wei, Stephen Xia, Sabrina Zhu, Sally Zhu and sophomore Alex Hu took first place in the 9/10 division, where the team of sophomores Akhilesh Chegu, Harsh Deep, Shounak Ghosh, Mark Hu, Caden Lin, Sasvath Ramachandran, Kailash Ranganathan and Deven Shah took third overall. Also in the 9/10 division, Zach Clark, Angela Jia, Chirag Kaushik, Alex Liou, Rohan Thakur, Michael Tran, Aimee Wang and Gloria Zhu, all grade 10, placed fifth. Placing fifth in the 11/12 division were juniors Shray Alag, Annesh Ghosh Dastidar, Sophia Horng, Helen Li, Luisa Pan, Aditya Tadimeti, Bowen Yin and Alex Zhai.
The annual TEAMS competition tasks students with answering multiple-choice and essay questions on a chosen topic for the year. Top qualifying teams from each state are invited to the National TSA Conference, where teams solve written problems and present their solutions. This year’s national conference, originally scheduled to take place in Nashville from June 27-July 1, was canceled due to safety concerns stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Harker eighth graders Anish Jain, Jordan Labio, Kyle Leung and Vardaan Ghai received an honorable mention in the Toshiba/National Science Teaching Association ExploraVision contest, one of the world’s largest student science competitions. Honorable mentions are given to the top 10 percent of submissions, of which there are about 5,000 every year. The students developed their project, titled “Nanosense: Eliminating Food Allergies Using IgE/Th1/Th2 Sensors and Nanotechnology,” with the help of middle school science teacher Kathy Peng. This year’s competition tasked students with examining the technology of today to envision how it might evolve over the next 20 years.
A team of computer scientists including Anand Natarajan ’09 recently published a proof that has solved “a raft of open problems in computer science, physics and mathematics,” wrote Quanta Magazine’s Kevin Hartnett. Natarajan co-authored the proof with researchers at Caltech, the University of Toronto, the University of Technology Sydney and the University of Texas, Austin. The full article contains an in-depth explanation of how the proof was developed.
Last month, seniors Finn Frankis and Sahil Gosain, juniors Arya Maheshwari and Saloni Shah, sophomore Sasvath Ramachandran and freshman Tiffany Chang competed at the 2020 US Invitational Young Physicists Tournament, held at Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, N.H. Each team took part in a “physics fight,” in which students present their solutions and are questioned by a member of another team. Teams are judged on the quality of their presentations as well as their ability to ask and answer questions. Although Harker was not one of this year’s top placing schools, the team was awarded the Clifford Swartz Trophy for having the best poster presentation. Harker won the tournament in 2011, 2014 and 2015.
During the summers following her sophomore and junior years, senior Anika Tiwari worked as an intern at the University of California, San Francisco. The project, which investigates especially hard-to-kill viruses known as phages, was published last week in Nature, one of the world’s top science journals. It was also the subject of an article in The Atlantic by noted science writer Ed Yong, published last Wednesday. Congratulations to Anika on this wonderful recognition!
As a top 10 finalist in this year’s 3M Young Scientist Challenge, eighth grader Reshma Kosaraju is eligible to win the Improving Lives Award, which is given to the project that the public believes to be the most beneficial. Voting is now open, and visitors can vote for their favorite project once a day until Oct. 25 at 5 p.m. eastern time.
June 26, 2019:
Yesterday, rising eighth grader Reshma Kosaraju was named one of the top 10 national finalists in the 2019 3M Young Scientist Challenge. Her project investigated how machine learning and neural networks could be used to predict and prevent forest fires. Each student participating in the competition submitted a video about a solution they devised for a common problem. As a finalist, Kosaraju has earned the opportunity to enter a special mentorship program, in which she will work with a 3M scientist to create a prototype of her project. She also is eligible to participate in the final competition, which will take place in late October at the 3M Innovation Center in St. Paul, Minn. The grand prize winner will receive $25,000.
In mid-May, junior Allison Jia was named one of two winners of the Intel Foundation Young Scientist Award at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair! Jia’s project, which studied proteins associated with neurodegenerative diseases, won her a $50,000 prize! It also was named Best in Category for cell and molecular biology and won a First Award, earning Jia an additional $5,000 and $1,000, respectively.
Senior Ruhi Sayana also did well at the fair, winning a $10,000 scholarship from the Drug, Chemical & Associated Technologies Association for her project in the biomedical and health sciences category, in which she also won a $1,000 Third Award from Intel ISEF and a $500 Second Award from the Ashtavadhani Vidwan Ambati Subbaraya Chetty Foundation. In the computational biology and informatics category, junior Cynthia Chen received a Third Award of $1,000. All three students won trips to the Intel ISEF at the Synopsys Silicon Valley Science & Technology Championship in March.
Jia’s efforts were writtten up in several publications:
In one of its best-attended years to date, the Harker Research Symposium attracted about 800 visitors from across the Harker community to recognize the school’s dedication to the sciences and encourage sustainable lifestyles and policies.
Sustainability was the main theme of this year’s event, which fittingly began with upper school vocal groups Cantilena and Camerata performing J. David Moore’s “We Belong to the Earth” under the direction of music teacher Susan Nace. The first keynote speaker was Max Holmes, deputy director and senior climate scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center, whose talk detailed how the behavior of rivers around the world can offer insight into global climate change.
Sustainability themes also were prevalent at the exhibitors area at the Nichols Hall atrium, which remained a popular attraction throughout the day. A student-run booth detailing the ways in which people can make their lives more environment-friendly greeted visitors as they walked through the front doors of Nichols Hall, alongside booths showcasing marine life, new technologies and the crucial role bees play in our daily lives (as well as the dangers presented by their decreasing populations).
At the Nichols Hall auditorium, a panel of Harker graduates shared their career retrospectives, including how their time at Harker influenced their trajectories and crucial lessons learned through their experiences. “Your career path is going to be windy and you’re going to be meeting a ton of…different people along the way,” said Shephalie Lahri ’05, associate director of marketing and reimbursement at the genetic testing company Natera. “Carve your own path and make sure you have the right advocates and champions,” she advised. The Nichols Hall rotunda was also busy, as upper school students at the Stem Buddies stations showed young science lovers how to purify water, create a DNA helix and find microplastics in ocean water.
The auxiliary gym once again hosted middle and upper school poster presentations, as students explained and answered questions on their research on a variety of topics, including zoology, physics and social science.
Surbhi Sarna ’03 returned to the Harker Research Symposium as this year’s alumna keynote speaker, giving a talk on her journey from being a patient at the age of 13 to becoming a medical technology entrepreneur and developing a device for early detection of ovarian cancer. Her company, nVision Medical, was purchased by Boston Scientific for $275 million last April.
This year’s afternoon keynote was given by David Haussler, an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical institute and distinguished professor of biomolecular engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Haussler took the afternoon audience on an “Odyssey in to the Human Genome,” examining the field of genomics and how the human genome has evolved.
July 9, 2019
Update: Over the last year, Alag has received numerous kudos for his research, including having his work published in both Smithsonian Magazine and PLOS, a professional research journal:
Nov. 29, 2018
Over the summer, senior Ayush Alag received a $10,000 grant from genetic research company Illumina to continue his research into food allergies, which led to the creation of his own company, Allergezy. The company aims to develop a safe and accurate means of genetic testing for allergies. Alag’s original research, which he pursued due to his own experiences with food allergies, was the basis for the project he submitted for the 2018 Synopsys Science & Technology Championship, which won a first award in the bioinformatics category. Recently, Alag was selected to give a poster presentation at the American Medical Informatics Association’s 2019 Informatics Summit in March, an opportunity typically reserved for medical professionals and graduate students. More information about Allergezy, its team and its mission can be found on the company’s website, which is maintained by Alag’s brother, Shray, Allergezy’s VP of marketing and web design.
Over a score of upper school girls from the Women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (WiSTEM) club traveled to Harker Preschool to do science activities with the littlest Harker students.
The visitors, 23 upper school students and 15 preschool parent volunteers, worked with 75 preschoolers on a variety of fun tasks, including exploring milk paint, which involves using soap to move color through milk. Other activities included generating static electricity with wool and plastic rods to attract paper bits; using a microscope and digital imager to look at leaf structures; using filter paper and marker ink to separate colors; making giant bubbles; and looking at preserved octopi, bats, birds, snakes, insects, sea shells and a sea star. The students also collaborated in a Lego Engineering math game. “The children had a great time,” noted Robyn Stone, STEM specialist for the preschool. “Preschool parents were very impressed by the Women in STEM’s passion for science and their ability to communicate with our young scientists,” she added.