Congratulations to middle school science teacher Thomas Artiss, who was named the 2015 Outstanding Biology Teacher for California by the National Association of Biology Teachers. Each year, the Outstanding Biology Teacher Awards recognize excellent biology teachers in all 50 states, Washington, D.C., Canada, Puerto Rico and other overseas territories. As a recipient of the award, Artiss is now eligible to attend a special honors luncheon at the 2015 NABT Professional Development Conference, to be held in November in Providence, R.I.
Established in 1962, the Outstanding Biology Teacher Award has since become one of the most prestigious annual awards given to biology and life science teachers. The award includes a complimentary one-year NABT membership, a special lapel pin and a gift certificate from Carolina Biological Supply Company.
In late June, a team of Harker rising juniors took second place overall in the 9/10 level at the national TEAMS (Tests of Engineering Aptitude, Mathematics and Science) competition in Grapevine, Texas. The team of Kai-Siang Ang, Neymika Jain, Evani Radiya-Dixit, Venkat Sankar, Manan Shah, Arjun Subramaniam, Peter Wu and team captain David Zhu also finished second in the problem solving competition and were among the top 10 teams in the prepared presentation portion of the event. “The team had the best showing yet of any Harker team who has competed in this event,” said Harker math teacher Anthony Silk, who coached the team.
The TEAMS competition begins every year at the state level, in which students answer multiple-choice math and science questions, as well as essay questions related to the year’s chosen topic. The top three teams from each state are then invited to the national competition, which has categories for written problems, prepared presentation and problem solving.
Several Harker students traveled to the California State Science Fair in Los Angeles from May 18-19, where they showcased the projects they had displayed earlier this year at the Synopsys Science & Technology Championship. In the senior division, recent graduate Neil Movva won an honorable mention in the electronics and electromagnetics category. In the junior division, grade 6 student Srinath Somasundaram took second place in applied mechanics and structures, while Alexander Young, grade 8, took fourth place in microbiology (medical). Congratulations to these hard-working science lovers!
Jonathan Ma, grade 11, was selected to attend the U.S. Physics Team Training Camp this year. He was one of only 20 students chosen nationwide. Ma will travel to the University of Maryland to attend the camp from May 17-28, where the team members will improve laboratory and problem-solving skills, hear lectures by prominent physicists and work with peers.
“The competition for a position on the U.S. Physics Team is intense and each student who participated in the 2015 selection process is deserving of recognition. They are the future of America’s success in physics related fields. AAPT is honored to recognize the exceptional scholars who qualified for the team and to support their further participation in the International Physics Olympiad,” said Dr. Beth A. Cunningham, Executive Officer of the American Association of Physics Teachers.
The training camp is a crash course in the first two years of university physics. Students learn at a very fast pace. They have an opportunity to hear about cutting edge research from some of the community’s leading physicists. At the end of the training camp, five team members will be chosen to represent the U.S. in Mumbai, India, at the 46th International Physics Olympiad, July 5-12.
Harker students had another successful year at the 2015 Synopsys Silicon Valley & Technology Championship, held in March at the San Jose Convention Center.
Three upper school contestants won grand prizes, earning them trips to the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. Juniors Jonathan Ma and Sadhika Malladi each won a grand prize in the Biological Sciences category, while Nitya Mani, grade 12, was a grand prize winner in Physical Sciences. Vedaad Shakib, grade 10, was named a grand prize alternate in Physical Sciences. Malladi and Mani also received $250 each from the Whitney Foundation, and Mani received a certificate of achievement from Mu Alpha Theta.
Upper school students were most successful in the RRI Biological Sciences category. In addition to the awards won by Ma and Malladi, Rahul Jayaraman, grade 12, won a first award. Vineet Kosaraju, grade 11, Madhuri Nori, grade 12, and Amrita Singh, grade 10, won second awards, while sophomore Venkat Sankar earned an honorable mention. Nori also received a second place award and $175 cash prize from the American Association for Laboratory Animal Science.
In RRI Physical Sciences, senior Vamsi Gadiraju earned a first award, a $100 first prize from Morgan Lewis and an honorable mention from the Society of Vacuum Coaters. Fellow senior Leo Yu also received several honors, including an honorable mention student award from the Association for Computing Machinery, a certificate from Arizona State University’s Walton Sustainability Solutions Initiatives, a certificate of achievement from Mu Alpha Theta and a certificate of achievement from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Amy Dunphy, grade 9, received an honorable mention and a high school finalist certificate from the Synopsys Outreach Foundation. Another honorable mention went to Evani Radiya-Dixit, grade 10.
Sophomore Rishab Gargeya won a second award in Bioinformatics. He was one of six award winners in the category, with grade 9 students Jerry Chen, Anastasiya Grebin, Amy Jin and Anooshree Sengupta all earning honorable mentions and Justin Xie, also grade 9, receiving a certificate of achievement from Mu Alpha Theta.
Trisha Dwivedi and Kshithija Mulam, both grade 10, each won honorable mentions in Botany. In Engineering, freshman Rajiv Movva and sophomore Arjun Subramaniam both earned first awards, with Subramaniam also winning a trip to the headquarters of cloud services provider Firebase to work on his application programming interface (API).
Manan Shah, grade 10, received a first award in Computers/Mathematics, in which Vedaad Shakib won a second award and a certificate of achievement and medallion from the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps. Sneha Bhetanabhotla, grade 10, received an honorable mention in the physics category.
In the Behavioral/Social category, junior Mary Najibi was awarded a certificate of achievement from the American Psychological Association. Sophomore Neymika Jain earned a second award in Medicine/Health/Gerontology and a certificate from ASU’s Walton Sustainability Solutions Initiatives.
Several Harker grade 8 students also had success at Synopsys. In Zoology, Nishka Ayyar and Srija Gadiraju both won honorable mentions, as did Ashli Jain and Sonal Muthal in the Chemistry category. Krish Kapadia and Anjay Saklecha both won first awards in Medicine/Health/Gerontology, and also received nominations to compete in this year’s Broadcom MASTERS competition.
In Behavioral/Social, Shafieen Ibrahim and Keval Shah won first awards and Broadcom MASTERS nominations. Meanwhile, Kaushik Shivakumar received a certification of achievement and medallion from the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps for his project in Physics, and Cindy Wang received an honorable mention in Engineering.
Finally, Alexander Young won a first award in Biochemistry/Microbiology and received a nomination to compete in Broadcom MASTERS.
This article appeared in the spring 2015 Harker Quarterly.
Editor’s note: This article first appeared in the inaugural issue of the journalism program’s magazine Wingspan in January 2015. Wingspan will publish four times a year, with in-depth news, features and design done by students. Harker Quarterly is proud to reprint this article on the Silicon Valley gender gap, which further explores the topic of women in technology (see also the winter 2014 HQ, page 6, “Inspiring Girls Who Code”).
by Kacey Fang, grade 12 and Elisabeth Siegel, grade 11
Photos and original layout by Shay Lari-Hosain, grade 11
She sits down in the last open seat of the Neural Networks computer science class in Nichols Hall – middle table, last row. The two tables adjacent her and the three in front each have two to three of her male classmates clustered around them, immersed in code. The male teacher walks around, answering occasional questions.
These 11 boys had been junior Anika Mohindra’s companions in the advanced topics course she took in the first semester of her junior year. A post-AP class, Neural Networks introduces students to artificial neural network technology and its applications.
“I remember when I walked in on the first day, I thought, ‘Oh, I’m the only girl in this class,’ and that made me a little nervous,” Mohindra said. “I know gender disparity is a problem, so letting it affect me makes me feel a little deficient.”
Computer science (CS) department chair Dr. Eric Nelson taught the class the last time it was offered six years ago. With two degrees in physics, he has previously worked in corporate research environments and at astronomical observatories. He said that the students’ choice of seating is voluntary, as he has no seating chart, and noted the strong gender discrepancy is not typical in Harker’s CS classes.
“[Last] semester was unusual, [with] only one [girl] in each section,” he wrote in an email. “[This] semester a third of the class (out of 18) is girls. Each girl handles the situation differently. Some work alone, and others are highly interactive with the other members of the class.”
AP CS teacher Susan King similarly encourages students to find work partners on their own. In her observation, students tend to favor working with members of the same gender.
“We work in partners a lot, and I want people to be comfortable with their partners,” King said. “Have I observed females particularly getting isolated by a bunch of males? Yes, I have. I’ve observed it in a number of schools. It hasn’t happened in a class of mine at Harker.”
King received her Bachelor of Science degree in CS from Montana State University in 1975, at a time when 19.8 percent of such degrees were conferred to females, according to the National Center for Education (NCES).
“I certainly know what [being isolated] is like,” she said. “I was often the only female in math classes or CS classes.”
That was 40 years ago, but the disparity continues. Mohindra’s experience as the minority gender reflects a broader downward trend of gender equity in technology.
As increasing numbers of women earn degrees in business, biology and physical sciences, the number of CS degrees received by women today is less than a third of what it was 30 years ago. In 2011, 18.2 percent of bachelor’s degrees in CS were given to women, compared to 37.1 percent in 1980, according to the NCES 2013 Digest of Education Statistics.
The term “pipeline” has become used throughout the industry with regard to how women become dissuaded from pursuing technology fields. Women are lost bit by bit through a pipeline that constricts as they move from early education through the subsequent years to employment age.
Harker positions itself as a “world-class institution” in the heart of Silicon Valley, the tech capital of the U.S. With 64 percent of last year’s female graduates self-reporting a plan to major in a STEM field, according to survey responses collected for The Winged Post’s college map, many already encounter or will go on to face gender disparities within these fields as they move along the pipeline.
Taking it to the next level
Senior Nitya Mani’s interest in STEM began at a young age, when her parents read her Richard Dawkins’ books on evolution. Love for math especially was a consistent part of her childhood. Since her years at Joaquin Miller Middle School in San Jose, she has done math research, taken a slew of advanced math and CS courses, and competed in math contests.
As Mani puts it, she “grew up on the math team.”
For the past semester, Mani, like Mohindra, had been the only female out of 13 in her advanced topics course in CS, Numerical Methods.
While most of the upper school’s classes have balanced gender ratios, there is a male majority in advanced CS courses like the ones Mani and Mohindra took.
According to Jennifer Gargano, assistant head of school for academics, enrollment in the upper school’s science departments such as biology and chemistry are relatively equal, but the courses following AP CS are 60 to 70 percent male.
Nationwide, The College Board has noticed a disparity between the genders in AP CS exams and a less severe one in AP Calculus BC exams. In 2013, 18.7 percent of AP CS test-takers and 40.5 percent of AP Calculus BC test-takers were female, according to the organization’s annual report.
“Historically there have been a disproportionate number of males taking AP exams in CS A,” said Amy Wilkins, The College Board’s social justice consultant, in an email interview. “Last year alone nearly 300,000 students with the potential to succeed in an AP course did not take one.”
Parental views can hinder young girls from STEM classes based on preconceived biases about whether girls can participate in the field.
Having grown up with a now 20-year- old brother, a 15-year-old brother and a 10-year-old sister, Chandini Thakur, grade 11, sees a different emphasis on STEM interests of males and females in her family. She plans on becoming a medical doctor, and her older brother studies computer engineering in college.
“My dad has already started working on getting my younger brother connected to people in engineering and not as much on my future career in the medical field,” she said. “It’s interesting to see that, because my sister’s already expressing an interest in engineering, and he’s not paying attention to that as much as he should be.”
As a teacher, science department chair and former AP teacher Anita Chetty has learned to pay attention to classroom dynamics. She recalls differences in reactions to girls’ and boys’ classroom participation in her years as a student.
“If boys made a mistake, people laughed it off,” she said. “If you were a female, you felt as though if you made a mistake it was not going to be funny. It was like, ‘You’re dumb.’”
Chetty’s interest in STEM led her to earn a B.S. in biology from the University of Calgary in Canada and two degrees in STEM education: a Bachelor of Engineering in education leadership at the University of Lethridge and a Master of Engineering in secondary science at the University of Portland.
As in Chetty’s observations, differences in attitudes towards disappointment divide students along gender lines. Her comments are rooted in research discussed in Dr. Diana Kastelic’s dissertation for the University of Denver, “Adolescent Girls’ Support for Voice in Education.” In her paper, Dr. Kastelic writes, “When boys fail, blame is placed on external factors, while success is attributable to ability. Surprisingly, girls’ achievement is attributed to luck and hard work, and failure is blamed on lack of ability.”
Mani refers to these and other subtle barriers against women pursuing STEM as “implicit discouragements.” She mentioned comments she received last summer from a Yale University professor alongside a male classmate.
“[The Yale professor] told the guy about the opportunities, and then he told me that I should look at the pre-med department, because that would be a better place
for me,” Mani said. While the professor’s motive was anyone’s guess, Mani said that hearing similar comments was commonplace and often disheartening. “There’s a lot of things that people do to implicitly discourage you. Now, it’s not so much [from pursuing] STEM, but to discourage women from pursuing pure STEM fields.”
For women and other minorities entering STEM, microaggressions, such as the one Mani faced, often result from unconscious bias.
From high school to college
After graduating from high school and beginning a major in STEM fields at campuses across the country, demographics in classrooms grow increasingly worse for females as they proceed along the pipeline to college.
Biology major Samantha Hoffman ’13 walks into the seminar room for her Computational and Mathematical Engineering (CME) class at Stanford University. What strikes her as odd is the composition of teaching assistants for the class.
“For both my CME classes, 100 percent of the TAs were male,” she said.
Hoffman, who plans to add a sub-concentration in neurobiology and a minor in creative writing, views the TA imbalance as an important issue to fix, due to female mentorship’s importance in encouraging female participation in STEM fields.
“The biggest problem is getting mentors, because without mentors, you can’t really get your advice. You can’t really get those connections to help you move forward in the industry,” Hoffman said.
As former upper school math department chair and middle school division head, as well as a math teacher at other public and private schools, Gargano stresses the importance of teachers as role models and guides. Throughout her study of math education during college, she was encouraged by professors who assumed she would go on to earn a master’s degree, even before she had planned to.
“It’s the teachers who really have so much power in terms of turning students onto a course that they thought they may not have interest in, or keep them loving a subject, too,” she said. “I think it’s all about the teachers.”
But finding a mentor for women in the worlds of academia can prove challenging on campuses like Stanford, where only three out of 54 of the CS department’s full-time faculty members are women, as Wingspan discovered by counting the department’s faculty on its website directory.
College and beyond: moving to the big league
Females who earn STEM degrees are faced with job placement as the next, and often most difficult, hurdle. According to the U.S. Department of Commerce’s 2011 Executive Summary of Women in STEM, females held only 24 percent of all working positions in STEM fields, even though females hold 48 percent of all jobs.
The disparity leads to disparagement, according to Tess Rinearson, a software engineer at blogging platform Medium in San Francisco and an attendee at Battle
of the Hacks 2014 at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, a programming invitational representative of over 50 events promoting innovation for college students.
“It’s something that people don’t want to talk about. It’s kind of the elephant in the room,” Rinearson said as one of five females out of 27 hackathon attendees in the room. “I’ve had lots of miscellaneous experiences where [I think,] ‘God, I wish there were more women in tech, because this behavior is unacceptable.’”
A Seattle native, Rinearson graduated from Lakeside High School and took classes at the University of Pennsylvania and Carnegie Mellon before leaving college after a year to pursue a job at Medium.
Her experience as a 21-year-old female in the tech world has led her to describe the industry’s culture of microaggressions as “death by a thousand papercuts.”
Sometimes, the sexism can be much more direct. Last year, Rinearson experienced a more in-your-face example.
“I was supposed to be judging this hackathon. I talked to this team one-on-one, and I was really enthusiastic about this team’s hack,” she said. “As I walked away I heard one of them say, ‘She wants the d—,’ which is totally inappropriate.”
For women in careers that require an online presence, microaggressions often occur in the form of Internet harassment. Planetary geologist Emily Lakdawalla, who currently works as an editor and evangelist for The Planetary Society, an organization involved in advancing space exploration, discusses and promotes science through social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
“When you’re on the Internet and you’re a female, you know it,” she said in a Skype interview. “It makes a difference. You get creepy comments. Initially I blew them all off, and over time it starts to get heavier and heavier, and you just don’t want to deal with them anymore.”
Writer and former physics student Eileen Pollack said combatting microaggressions that females bear while in a male-dominated field will help increase the number of women in tech. Pollack, who in 1978 became one of the first two women to earn a Bachelor of Science degree in physics at Yale, published “Why Are There Still So Few Women in Science?” in The New York Times Magazine in 2013. Later this year, she will publish her memoir, “The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still a Boys’ Club.”
“There are studies that say that women leave voluntarily because they want ‘people fields,’ and to this, I say, ‘There are no people in engineering?’” she said in a phone interview. “Engineers and chemists and computer scientists work in teams. There’s an idea that women walk away from the fields voluntarily, and that’s nonsense. [They are] already struggling under so many burdens every day where they feel they don’t belong.”
Females leaving or being unable to enter tech positions is not just an issue of social fairness but also an issue that impacts earning potential over a lifetime. According to Forbes, the highest paying jobs for college graduates are in engineering, with a median starting pay of $53,400. Even in the workplace, females earn less than their male counterparts; a 2012 American Association of University Women report stated that on average, a female in engineering makes 88 percent of what a male does when both are one year out of college.
Valuations of startup companies are at an all-time high, according to Forbes, with nearly 40 startups worth more than $1 billion in 2013. However, according to a 2013 report from Pitchbook, a data provider for venture capitalist markets, only 13 percent of venture capital deals had at least one female co-founder.
Seed accelerators like Y Combinator in Mountain View provide seed funding in exchange for an equity share in a prospective startup. Company partner Kat Manalac said Y Combinator received 5,000 applications last year, but only around one in four of the companies had a female founder. In response, Y Combinator launched its first Female Founders Conference last March with 450 attendees, involving a host of female founders sharing their stories. Another was slated for February.
“The big focus should be on how to get more women and people of color hired and in leadership positions at tech companies,” Manalac said in an email interview. “I’m encouraged because I’ve started to see a lot of smart people devoting their time to building solutions. The emphasis should be on action.”
Steps ahead
Mani and Mohindra both see themselves moving forward in the male-dominated field, confident that things will change by the time they are in graduate school.
“I think that the only way to break the gender gap is to get in when you’re the minority gender,” Mani said. “I feel fine, because there are going to be enough women around me. By the time that I get a Ph.D., there will be a lot of women with me, because I think it’s changing.”
As a senior next year, Mohindra plans to take Harker’s CS advanced topics courses Expert Systems and Computer Architecture, as well as the advanced mathematics topics courses Differential Equations 2 and Signals and Systems.
“I think within a decade, we’ll definitely have a lot more women in higher positions in STEM, and having those leaders as examples will provide yet another push for women to enter the fields,” she said.
Female alumnae have gone on to success in STEM fields. Forbes’ 2014 “30 Under 30” list in science and health care featured Surbhi Sarna ’03, who founded nVision Medical, a technology intended to improve ovarian cancer detection. Currently, several of the most prominent Bay Area tech companies are led by female chief executive officers such as Susan Wojcicki of YouTube, Marissa Mayer of Yahoo! and Meg Whitman of Hewlett-Packard. Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, and Mayer declined an interview with Wingspan.
At Harker, Gargano says she has explored some of the existing opportunities or initiative organizations that the upper school currently has in order to improve any imbalance, including WiSTEM (Women in STEM). Improvement, according to her, is still on the agenda moving forward.
“I think we have a lot of really accomplished females in those areas. Why wouldn’t we want to push forward those efforts?” Gargano said. “We can do better, and we should do better.”
Females already in the industry see hope for the future. Ruchi Sanghvi, who became the first female engineer at Facebook in 2005, helped develop the Newsfeed and Facebook Platform. She offers advice for females planning to enter tech fields to stand their ground but be ready for challenges.
“Don’t be afraid to voice your opinion. Don’t be afraid to ask for opportunities – raise your hand and ask for those opportunities,” she said. “When you’re offered a seat on a rocketship, don’t ask which one, just take it.”
This article originally appeared in the spring 2015 Harker Quarterly.
STEM Buddies days at Harker Preschool are always special, with students proudly donning buddy badges and taking turns filing excitedly into the science lab. There they have the unique opportunity to visit and interact with upper school pals, who have come to share their love of all things STEM.
Passing along the joy of science, technology, engineering and mathematics is the goal behind Harker’s innovative STEM Buddies program, which teams the school’s littlest learners with upper school students from the WiSTEM Club for fun, interactive learning through a series of themed workshops. At their first visit more than a year ago, club members presented each preschool student with a special button to wear during their time together.
Anita Chetty, upper school science department chair, and Robyn Stone, Harker Preschool’s STEM specialist, came up with the win-win idea to pair members of Harker’s WiSTEM (Women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) with the preschool children to meet regularly for hands-on STEM exploration.
Since then, the STEM Buddies workshops, held several times throughout the year for the 4- and 5-year-olds, have been a huge hit. Each activity is focused around a particular topic or strand of STEM. The younger students are excited to have their big buddies come by, while the teens are gaining confidence about sharing and teaching complicated knowledge in ways that are simple to understand.
“This collaborative opportunity is aligned with WiSTEM’s mission to spread the love of STEM,” reported Chetty.
According to Stone, the workshops have proven to be the perfect fit for the preschool’s STEM specialty class, offering a balance between child-directed exploratory learning and WiSTEM-directed activities.
WiSTEM’s stated mission is to foster female students’ interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, to provide role models and mentors in those fields, and to educate the community about gender issues in the sciences. The club, which Chetty advises, sponsors guest lecturers, holds technical workshops for the Harker community led by female scientists, and creates a network of female mentors – including Harker alumnae – working in STEM fields.
On an afternoon in early December, seven members of WiSTEM (juniors Grace Cao, Alyssa Crawford, Shreya Mathur and Chandini Thakur; and seniors Allison Kiang, Daniela Lee and Nitya Mani) traveled to the preschool campus to work with students on a series of STEM activities related to life science and the human body.
“Today we are going to learn all about the human body,” Chetty informed the youngsters, welcoming them to the science lab and explaining that the WiSTEM Club members had planned various stations for their visit.
The first station covered the integumentary system, allowing the preschoolers to use a proscope (digital microscope) to examine things like hair, skin and freckles. The second station was on the skeletal system, where the youngsters met “Mr. Skelly” and participated in a “bone dance.” The third station, on the muscular system, allowed them to use a sensor to squeeze a muscle and determine how much force it exerted, as well as examine the muscles of a chicken wing. For station four, on the cardiovascular system, the children used a stethoscope to hear how their heart sounds before and after jumping, and were also able to view a dissected pig heart. Station five, on the digestive system, provided useful nutrition information as well as coloring pages of the digestive tract. The respiratory system was covered in station six, allowing students to work with a sensor and graph to determine their lung volume. And finally, station seven on the senses was all about optical illusions and refractions.
Wearing a white WiSTEM T-shirt, club member Cao was working in the muscle station, measuring and graphing her younger buddies’ grip strength. She said she found the STEM Buddies event to be very enjoyable and the children to be outgoing and active participants. “I feel that the program is going really well. Teaching and interacting with preschoolers is a fun experience!” she added.
Lending a helping hand was parent volunteer Tiffany Tuell. Her daughter, 4-year-old Lexington, said her favorite station was “the breathing one.” The preschooler especially enjoyed being able to use the lung volume sensor and spending time with “the big kids.”
Coming up in April, the next STEM Buddies event is slated to revolve around chemistry. Other prospective programs might cover such topics as environmental science, space science, explorations in light/dark, human physiology, anatomy and mathematics.
Previously, the WiSTEM Club put on a short musical for the preschool students about composting using worms (to reduce waste on the preschool campus). They also made posters about what worms eat. The children had the opportunity to hold and explore worms together during the session. Other stations included making recycled newspaper pots, planting pumpkin seeds, petting the rabbits in the Farm, and making corn husk dolls. Since that lesson, Stone and her students have been diverting food scraps to the worms, and even have a small worm “condo” in the STEM lab.
“The buddies program is such a clever idea,” said parent Tuell. “It makes STEM learning fun!”
Last week, Harker sophomores Sneha Bhetanabhotla, Trisha Dwivedi, Neymika Jain and Kshithija Mulam traveled to San Diego to present their research project at the annual meeting of the Society of Toxicology. Their project, on alternative breast cancer treatments, was one of eight high school projects chosen from around the country. On March 24, the students presented it for the first time to toxicology professors and experts.
That same day, the students met with researchers from Paris and toured the San Diego Convention Center. The following day, they were chosen to present at the poster session where toxicology experts were showing their research.
“Our research considered alternative treatments to breast cancer by using sodium bicarbonate to counteract acidity and enhance alkalization in the body in order to inhibit the invasion and metastasis of the cancer tumor,” said Mulam. “This experiment was conducted in vitro on mammary carcinoma cell line 4T1 using known anti-cancer supplement epigallocatechin gallate (green tea extract) as a comparison point to sodium bicarbonate.”
“Our project was accepted to the poster presenting session in which other professionals and researchers were presenting their works,” said Dwivedi. “On both days, we had a lot of professors and experts on the cancer cells and experiments we tested, so we received both commendations as well as feedback on how we can improve our project and take it to the next level. We are pleased to see that many experts who had been researching what we did were interested by what we had done, and our team is hopeful to expand upon our project to hopefully be able to present at next year’s conference in New Orleans.”
The professors in attendance were happy to offer advice to the students, who jumped at the opportunity to receive feedback from notable people in the field. “The chance to network with professionals and to present our findings to a larger audience at the conference was definitely an unforgettable experience for all of us,” said Mulam, “We hope to encounter more opportunities that help us further explore and appreciate the merits of research in the future.”
This past weekend, a team of five Harker students participated in the South/West Bay Area Regional Middle School Science Bowl, taking second place behind Miller Middle School in a final round that was decided by a mere six points. Team Harker – comprising grade 8 students Leon Lu, Akshay Ravoor, Kaushik Shivakumar, Katherine Tian and team captain Alexander Young – suffered only one loss in the early rounds, against Kennedy Middle School, and then defeated four other schools to reach the finals. Because Miller had not yet lost, they had to be defeated twice in the final round. “Harker beat Miller decisively in the final, scoring 108 to 50 points,” said middle school science teacher Vandana Kadam. “However, Miller still had one life and Harker had to go against them again and in this round Miller got an early lead of 54 points over Harker in the first half.” In the second half, Harker claimed a 66-18 lead, but a new rule that introduced a limit of 23 questions per round prevented Harker from moving any further.
“Although Harker came in second, the performance by the team members was a winning one!” Kadam exclaimed. “They did a commendable job in every round. It is not easy to sit through 11 rounds answering the hardest science questions you can find, ranging from Earth science to astronomy to life science to physical science to mathematics.”
Today Society for Science & the Public announced that Harker seniors Andrew Jin, Rohith Kuditipudi and Steven Wang were named finalists in the 2015 Intel Science Talent Search (STS), making Harker the only school in the country with three finalists. This also breaks Harker’s previous record of two finalists, set in 2011. Harker has now produced a total of nine finalists since it began participating in the Intel STS during the 2005-06 school year, when Yi Sun ’06 took second place nationally.
Jin, Kuditipudi and Wang were among 15 semifinalists from Harker – the most of any school in the nation – who were named earlier this month. They now join 40 other high school students from across the United States who will travel to Washington, D.C., in March for the final stage of the competition, where more than $1 million in cash prizes will be awarded.
While in Washington, the finalists will have the opportunity to demonstrate their research to key figures in the scientific community and national leadership. Winners will be announced at a special invitation-only gala at the National Building Museum on March 10.