Kudos to inspiring young social entrepreneur Suraya Shivji, grade 12, who created an altruistic app to raise money to help African orphans become self-sufficient.
Shivji taught herself to program iPhone gaming apps and get them posted on Apple’s app store. She is now using them, along with a crowd-funding campaign she began this year on her website, Rizikitoto, as a source of revenue for the needy orphans.
The website has generated about $1,300 for the children at a Ugandan orphanage, Bright Futures Home, with money from each app designated for a particular child. The orphanage program is further supported by Girls Who Code, a national nonprofit group that seeks to close the gender gap in technology and engineering.
This story is a continuation of “Harker Research: Profiles in Perseverance,” a story that appeared in the winter 2014 Harker Quarterly highlighting scientific research being performed by Harker students. Read on to find out more about these students’ fascinating projects and exciting discoveries!
Shikhar Dixit, Grade 12
Shikhar Dixit’s interest in STEM research led him to perform pharmaceutical research at biotech company Cellworks last year. He later discovered that he enjoyed immunology. “I find immunology intriguing because of the interesting intricacies involved,” he said. “When reading research about how the immune system relates to the eye, I became even more interested in pursuing this project.”
For his project, “Immunomodulation by Human Retinal Pigment Epithelial Cell Line ARPE-19,” Dixit was mentored by Dr. Andrew W. Taylor at Boston University Medical Center. “My experience … in the lab environment dealing with fascinating lab equipment and cell cultures while interacting with many Ph.D. and medical students has been the most exciting part of the research,” he said.
Over the course of his research, Dixit found that “there are specific tissues in the body such as the eyes, brain, central nervous system and testes that suppress inflammation in a phenomenon known as immune privilege.”
Matthew Huang, Grade 12
Matthew Huang’s “interest and passion in physics” led him to his research project of quarks and gluons. “I’ve always had a curiosity for how the universe worked at a fundamental level, and researching about quarks and gluons is the perfect subject,” he said.
His project, “Quarks and Gluons in Spacetime: BiCGSTAB Implementation of Lattice QCD on Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessor,” sought to find “a more efficient way to carry out lattice QCD processes, which determine the interactions between quarks and gluons.” One of the most fascinating things he learned was that “you can never separate a pair of quarks, no matter how much energy you put in. Empty space is not actually empty, but filled with oscillating energy fields comprised of gluons.”
Huang’s mentor, William Detmold of MIT, “guided me throughout the entire project and remained supportive through difficulties.”
Leeza Kuo, Grade 12
Leeza Kuo, grade 12, chose stem cells as the subject of her research project, “Embryonic stem cell markers KLf4 and SSEA1 expressed as a result of acute-liver damage,” because of the possible health benefits they offer. “I love to help others and researching stem cells could lead to new regenerative health procedures that could help many people,” she said. “Stem cells are very popular field of research today partially because of the potential it could have on regenerative medicine.”
Being in the research program at Harker afforded Kuo opportunities she may not have had otherwise. “Thanks to [Harker’s] strong science program, I was able to complete my research project using methods including electrophoresis and polymerase chain reaction that are not readily available at most other schools,” she noted.
The extra help sessions she attended at school also helped her understand material more clearly, as it allowed her to review topics with her teachers and ask more pointed questions. “Harker teachers are always extremely supportive and encouraging in their student’s work because of the small faculty to student ratio,” Kuo said. “All my teachers know me by name along with my personality and character.”
What excited Kuo most about her research was the implications it may have for changing how – and how long – people live: “Induced pluripotent stem cells could be the key to reversing aging and repairing genetic mutations by implanting new tissues, becoming the non-fictional fountain of youth.”
Ankita Pannu, Grade 12
Ankita Pannu’s project, “Mining online cancer support groups: improving healthcare through social data,” was special to her for a variety of reasons, but one stands out. “I wanted to do this project after a member in my family was diagnosed with thyroid cancer,” she recalled. “I spent a lot of time in thyroid cancer support groups and I realized that they are really hard to navigate, so I decided to use my knowledge of computer science to solve this problem.”
Pannu’s hope was to make this particular online support group easier to navigate so that thyroid cancer patients will have an easier time finding helpful materials. “I hoped to be able to summarize and categorize threads so that users would be able to easily determine whether it would be valuable for them to read,” she said. “I also tried to find correlations between symptoms and treatments based on what people were discussing.”
In addition to having success in these areas, she said it gave her some ideas for future research she hopes to pursue. The project also gave her a chance to combine her love of computer science and linguistics into a single project.
“I have always been interested in computer science and especially the intersection of linguistics and CS to find meaning in human language,” she said. “It is so fascinating to me that computers are becoming more intelligent systems and we can use different algorithms to make sense out of natural language.”
Archana Podury, Grade 12
Hematology was new for Archana Podury, grade 12, who is working with Stanford University’s Dr. Anu Parla while researching uses for the novel drug CX-5641 for her project, “Targeting Myelodisplasia in 5q- Syndrome Using Novel Drug CX-5641.” Podury has found Dr. Narla to “incredibly helpful.
“When I was becoming familiar with the pathways and the properties of blood cells that were involved with the drug, she decided to hold weekly lectures in her office to teach me segments of confusing material and answer any questions I had.”
Shadowing Narla at a hematology clinic at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital, Podury had the opportunity to “meet actual patients, study patient samples and learn about blood smears. She always works to contextualize her research and works very closely with her patients, which reinforced to me that research isn’t just a distanced study that happens in a lab, it has actual application for real people.”
Under Narla’s mentorship, Podury, has been considered a real member of the team at the lab. “Since I’m still working in the lab during the school year, she organizes monthly lab meetings discussing everyone’s projects and makes sure I can make it to the meetings,” Podury said. “I’m very thankful to have had her as a mentor; she has helped me so much throughout the process.”
Podury hopes that her work at the lab will reveal that “[CX-5641] can selectively target defective 5q- cells in not just an A549 model, but also in CD34 blood cells and in patient samples. It’s a long way to go, but I’m excited to keep working.”
Because she is not yet 18, Podury is not able to work with core blood, but watching her colleagues process core blood has been one of the most exciting parts of her research. She has also been introduced to techniques that she had not been familiar with previously. “I learned about viral transfections and knocking down segments of DNA using lentivirus, which was especially interesting because we learned about lentivirus in AP Bio, but I never knew something so dangerous could be used so effectively in research,” she said.
Podury’s experience with research began in middle school through the Harker Research Club. Prior to her work at Stanford, she worked at Harker’s Open Lab. “I was able to see many sides of research that I didn’t know about before, like how important the stage of ordering materials is, how unpredictable results can be even when they’re planned very precisely, and how to analyze and respond to errors in data,” she said. “Harker lets us access so many resources, and before working in open lab, I honestly had no idea that the lab had so much high quality equipment that was available to students. It’s really a privilege.”
Sahana Rangarajan, Grade 12
“I wanted to spend my summer at a research internship to gain the experience necessary to conduct research in college,” said senior Sahana Rangarajan.
Her project, “Tracking parallel mutation trajectories conferring increased resistance to HIV-RT inhibitors,” was the result of a newfound interest in biology and programming. “Thus, bioinformatics seemed a perfect field to try research in,” she said.
The goal of the research was to improve ways of predicting how HIV develops mutations that resist drug treatment. In the process, the research team “used a new method that yielded promising results,” Rangarajan said. Interestingly, she added, “there was no lab based component, but learning about the biology behind HIV was necessary for me to understand what I was doing.”
Nikash Sankar, Grade 12
During his work as a volunteer at a dementia care facility, senior Nikash Shankar witnessed the ravages of Alzheimer’s disease firsthand, and wanted to help. “As I was investigating various herbal remedies for Alzheimer’s, I came across curcumin, a spice that is commonly used in Asian cooking,” he said. “Being familiar with the spice, I became interested in its effects on Alzheimer’s disease and possible methods of improving its efficacy.”
Researching further, Shankar discovered he could increase curcumin’s ability to reduce toxicity caused by Alzheimer’s through “encapsulation of curcumin into polymeric nanoparticles.”
Adding to the field of Alzheimer’s research was the most exciting part of his project, titled “A Potential Therapy for Alzheimer’s Disease: Encapsulation of Curcumin within Polymeric PLGA-PEG Nanoparticles Protects Neuro2A cells from Beta-Amyloid Induced Cytotoxicity and Improves Bioavailability.” “Everything we find through our research (that is novel) is something that no one has ever found before and discovering or even validating a scientific finding as a high school student is a rare opportunity,” he said.
Science teachers Chris Spenner, Anita Chetty and other Harker faculty members provided helpful feedback to Sankar as he was creating his paper.
Aside from having a unique research opportunity, Shankar also had the rare chance to use a scanning electron microscope. “SEM’s are incredibly expensive and only very few exist in California,” he said.
Venkat Sankar, Grade 10
Sophomore Venkat Sankar’s interest in environmental science led him to research the environmental impact of the proposed billion-dollar Panoche Valley Solar Farm, which would be constructed in central California’s Panoche Valley if approved.
Sankar said he was “[concerned] about the potential impact of the Panoche [Valley] Solar Farm project on the rare and endangered wildlife in the area.” The main goal of his project, ‘Managing the Impact of Infrastructure Projects on Endangered Species: A Stochastic Simulation Approach Based on Population Viability Analysis,’ was to use computer simulations that would analyze available information and use it to simulate a system, in hopes of coming up with “a detailed assessments of the impact of infrastructure projects on endangered wildlife.”
He received help from middle school science teacher Daniel Sommer, who offered advice and introduced Sankar to an expert in environmental sciences. Upper school science teacher Jeff Sutton also provided input on the final paper.
“It has been validated using a real-life case study in California,” Sankar said of his project. “It is broadly applicable to a range of environmental impact studies around the world.”
Madelyn Wang, Grade 12
After taking Harker’s research methods class in grade 10, Madelyn Wang, now grade 12, became interesting in pursuing scientific research. This past summer, she enrolled at UC Davis’ Young Scholars Program , where she worked on developing a blot procedure for detecting trace amounts of protein in tissue samples with her mentor, Dr. Aldrin Gomes. “I also studied the protein expression levels of GSTM1, an antioxidant enzyme, and looked at if those levels were altered in diabetic and non-diabetic mice,” she said. He project is titled “Optimized Western blotting allows for detection of Glutathione S-Transferase Mu 1 levels in hearts from type I diabetic Akita mice and wild-type mice.”
Overall, Wang said her time spent in the Young Scholars Program “was a great way to get hands-on experience in the lab while living in the dorms and getting a college experience.”
Serena Wang, Grade 12
“I have always been curious and eager to try new things,” said senior Serena Wang of her project, “Coronary Artery Calcification and Cardiovascular Risk Factors in South Asians.” “This project mainly required me to develop my abilities to do statistical analysis, which I had never focused on before.”
Wang drew on her background in computer science to analyze data she had gathered about cardiovascular disease. “Heart disease is a common illness, and I wanted to improve current methods of predicting cardiovascular disease risk,” she said.
Mentored by Ashish Mathur of the South Asian Heart Center at El Camino Hospital, Wang utilized the resources made available to her to identify a specific area of study. “I wish to find a better way to determine cardiovascular disease risk for the South Asian population, which suffers from a significantly higher prevalence of cardiovascular disease than other ethnicities,” she said.
The skills Wang learned at Harker were key to helping her gain a greater understanding of the topic. “After learning so much at school, I am finally able to use the theoretical concepts I learned in school to do novel research,” she said. “The potential effects of my results could help the South Asian Heart Center better predict cardiovascular disease risk and thus more effectively prevent development of the disease.”
Wang’s research gave her the opportunity to pick up new skills, including the use of statistical analysis software. “With such specific syntax and so many different commands, the software was challenging to learn to use efficiently, but now I am experienced enough to even teach a new student researcher how to use the application.”
Samyukta Yagati, Grade 12
During her freshman year, Samyukta Yagati, who has been doing research projects since grade 7, became interested in computer science, a subject she has pursued actively ever since. “Research is a lot of fun for me,” she said. “I enjoy the process, the discovery, the challenge, applying things I’ve learned in class to real-life problems.”
Her project, “Optimizing Segmentation Performance to Improve Diagnosis of Breast Lesions,” gave her the opportunity to explore both computer science and biology, a topic she had recently become enamored with. “I have loved computer science since freshman year, and I’ve been interested in bio. That interest intensified after bio in junior year,” she recalled.
In her research, Yagati hoped to improve an algorithm that is used to diagnose patients with breast lesions. “Improving the results/increasing automation of the process can really help effectiveness and usability of the program in clinics, hopefully improving patient experience and treatment,” she said.
While researching for the project, Yagati learned some interesting things about medical research: “Knowing information as simple as whether the edge of a lesion … is spiky or not can give doctors a lot of information about malignancy!”
Michael Zhao, Grade 11
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, perhaps better known by the acronym ALS and the nickname Lou Gehrig’s disease, received a lot of attention this past summer due to the craze created by the Ice Bucket Challenge.
Junior Michael Zhao’s own research began after he read numerous articles on the topic. “Especially over the summer, with the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, I felt like my research had a tangible impact and made the experience more interesting,” he said.
Zhao’s project, “A Yeast Functional Screen Elucidates Potential Mechanisms of C9ORF72 RAN Protein Toxicity in ALS Pathogenesis,” involved searching for genetic modifiers for RAN proteins. “RAN proteins, the focus of my research, were first identified in 2011,” he said. “Yet, three years later, we still know very little about the underlying mechanisms of RAN protein toxicity.”
Zhao worked with a mentor that he said was extremely helpful. “My mentor has taught me many techniques to perform experiments, he said. “Furthermore, he offered me an experience I could never have hoped to obtain elsewhere.” Working in a university lab was also a new and exciting experience, which offered many learning opportunities.
In addition, he received a lot of help from Harker science teachers in refining his project. “In particular, they were very helpful in reading over my paper and giving me feedback,” he said.
This article originally appeared in the winter 2014 Harker Quarterly.
In October, more than 8,000 visitors poured into the Phoenix Convention Center in Arizona. For the week of Oct. 8, the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing was the biggest show in town. Scientists, engineers, college students and faculty came from around the globe. An overwhelming majority of the attendees were female. As a rare high-school participant chosen for my research, I was honored to be a part of this intellectual mix.
For three days, the convention center was abuzz with activity. While the daylight hours were filled with informational and inspiring talks, evenings mixed in “mocktails” and entertainment. The conference was kicked off by Shafi Goldwasser’s keynote address. An electric engineering and computer science professor at MIT, Goldwasser is the world’s leading researcher in cryptography, working on privacy issues in our uber-connected world. She was followed by other luminaries from the computing world: Yoky Matsuoka from Nest Labs, Linda Northrop from the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute, Lori Mackenzie from Stanford University, and many others.
Personally, I thought this was two conferences in one. While much of the time was focused on how women are shaping modern technology, there was also a serious discussion around the role of society in shaping young girls, especially when it comes to STEM (science, technology, engineering and math). Ruthe Farmer, director of the National Center for Women & IT, spoke on the importance of getting girls interested in science at a young age. While some of us at Harker may not realize the problem, I agree with her when she argues that there is a significant STEM gender gap.
Megan Smith, CTO of the United States, was a surprise speaker. She reports to the president himself, and she talked about her role in the government in helping reverse this gender gap tide. Deborah Estrin from Cornell University commented that women should be “forming science circles instead of coffee groups.”
Interestingly, a casual on-stage conversation between Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, and Maria Klawe, president of Harvey Mudd College, garnered the most press. In response to a question around salary discrepancies between men and women, Nadella was “inarticulate” (as he himself later admitted), inadvertently implying that women should not be asking for raises and instead wait for “good karma” to play out. Many people in the audience, including me, were alarmed at his response.
Ironically, the ensuing media firestorm may have actually helped the cause. The dialogue went national, and certainly helped in increasing awareness around the disparities between men and women in the industry.
Beyond the engaging sessions, a personal highlight was the poster session. Over the last year, I have been working on research in data science. It was an honor to share my work at such a prominent venue. Hundreds of people stopped by to see my poster. They listened to my pitch. Some even hugged me and encouraged me. My project involved mining online thyroid cancer forums. My effort came about when a loved one was diagnosed with the disease. I found myself spending countless hours online, reading hundreds of “threads” and looking for answers. While these forums are valuable sources of data, searching them isn’t always simple. It was then that the thought of extracting “word-of-mouth” patient experiences came to me. By applying natural language processing techniques – part-of-speech tagging, topic modeling and association rules – I was able to develop models for discussion topics and thread summaries. I also laid the groundwork for discovering and correlating symptoms and treatments. My project ended up being a first-of-a- kind effort at mining such insights from free-form medical forums, making the data valuable to patients and health care professionals alike.
After three productive days, the conference came to an end. On my flight back, I went through my collection of more than 100 business cards, and remembered meeting my new friends, all of whom shared my passion for computing. While it’s true that women are severely underrepresented in STEM, and that females make up less than 20 percent of enrollees in our engineering colleges, I sense that a revolution is underway. It won’t be long before we turn this tide. I left the event inspired to double-down on my own dreams in the field of computer science. Rejuvenated by the energy, I am also committed to bringing more females into STEM.
I can’t wait for the conference registration to open next year. I hope some of you will join me there!
The Harker business and entrepreneurship department held its inaugural Harker BEcon2014. This business, economics and entrepreneurship conference introduced Harker students, non-Harker students and the Harker community at large to professionals in a variety of fields, including sales, venture capital and economics. The program comprised keynotes and roundtables in business and economics, workshops taught by professionals, student business venture competitions and student presentations.
The daylong event began with a poster session, in which students presented projects they developed during an entrepreneurship course taught by Juston Glass, director of the B.E. department. The adult attendees were very interested in and impressed by the facets of the projects, which ranged from business plans for innovative products to marketing proposals for companies.
Debbie Tranowski, parent of Logan Drazovich, grade 11, commented, “I want to thank you and the students for organizing a very interesting BEcon inaugural event yesterday. Logan, as well as my husband and I, enjoyed the entire event. It was very well organized. We are lucky to have access to so much parent talent within the Harker community. I hope this will be one of many such events in the future.”
Following student presentations, Stanford professor Ran Abramitzky gave a keynote about the economics of education and its effect on decision‐making in secondary education. The auditorium was filled with students eager to learn more about economics and its application to real-life scenarios. Claudia Medina, parent of Adriano Hernandez, grade 9, wrote to the team, “Noya Abramitzky, professor Ran Abramitzky’s wife, stopped by my office [at Stanford University] and told me that Ran was very impressed by the event, the level of service and the Harker school. He told her the event was organized and delivered at ‘Stanford level.’ I wanted to share this kudos with you and your team of students, who did such a wonderful job.”
Students then attended the economics roundtable, sHarker Tank or the resume/interview workshop. The economics roundtable was a Q&A with San Jose State University economics professor Tom Means; Lawrence Wu, president of NERA Economic Consulting; and Jordan Goheen, senior examiner at the Federal Reserve Bank. By far the biggest hit at the conference, sHarker Tank, based on the popular TV show Shark Tank, was designed to give students a mock opportunity to pitch their business ideas to authentic venture capitalists. The highest scoring participants out of 10 prequalified teams advanced to the second round, which involved a sales pitch of an undisclosed product. Neil Movva, grade 12, won the competition with his product, Pathfinder, which aids the blind by utilizing an infrared laser to provide feedback while out in public. Movva was awarded an exclusive mentor luncheon with successful entrepreneur Ashok Krishnamurthi, who participated in the conference. Coming in second place was Yash Narayan, grade 5, with BullyWatch, a product that helps deal with bullying in schools. Third place was given to the team of Vineet Kosaraju, grade 11, Andrew Jin, grade 12, and Rishabh Jain, grade 12, who created a product called InMaps to help large facilities cater to their guests by providing interactive maps of the interiors of their buildings. During the resume/interview workshop, successful businessmen and businesswomen involved in the CareerConnect mentorship and professionalism programs offered demonstrations on powerful interviews and resumes.
“The event was very well-organized and the speakers were great. I personally enjoyed the sHarker Tank the most,” Medina added.
A key aspect of the conference was the mentoring lunch. Attendees enjoyed a wonderful lunch with some of Silicon Valley’s finest. This was a great opportunity for attendees to hear inspirational stories of both success and failure from business professionals.
After lunch, there was a business roundtable with Ashok Krishnamurthi, co-founder of Xsigo Systems and Juniper Networks; Sanjay Sharma, CEO of Roambee Corp.; and Angie Krackeler, program manager at IBM. The participants discussed their paths to success, as well as their points of view on controversial topics in business today. In addition, students participated in economics games including Golden Balls, in which participants engaged in a battle of wits to develop game-theory strategies and defeat opponents, akin to a popular British game show by the same name. Also, students challenged their economics knowledge in a fun and interactive competition to determine the economic king on campus. The conference also featured a Startup 101 workshop, where Pradeep Aswani, founder of Securematics, discussed what it takes to launch a startup; a personal finance workshop, where Amanda Mathias, a certified financial planner and enrolled agent, discussed wealth management; and a sales workshop featuring Freddie Engineer, a regional sales manager for a large company, who taught the most effective methods to move the product from the seller to the consumer.
Jeremy King, CTO of global e-commerce for WalmartLabs, gave the final keynote. He has led the engineering and product aspects as well as the Web operation teams charged with developing Walmart Labs’ online business on a global scale. He talked about his job and his path to becoming an executive at one of the biggest companies on the planet.
Overall, the conference was a success, with nearly 200 attendees, and inspiring speakers and competitions. The BEcon2014 team looks forward to continuing the tradition and making annual improvements.
By Zach Jones, with additional information provided by debate teachers Carol Green, Jenny Alme and Karina Momary
Students Earn Accolades and TOC Spots at Presentation High
More than 30 Harker students attended the Presentation High School Public Forum Invitational held the weekend of Nov. 8. Eighteen upper school students competed in the varsity division while four upper school and eight middle school students competed in the novice division; three seniors came to the tournament to coach novices.
Two of Harker’s varsity teams made it into the Elite Eight, with one team debating its way to the final two, losing the final round on a 2-1 decision. Seniors Nikhil Kishore and Vamsi Gadiraju rocked their first tournament of the season as final-round participants and earned their first leg to the Tournament of Champions.
Kishore and Gadiraju are the fifth Harker public forum team to earn half of their qualifying legs only two months into the season.
The top eight teams in elimination rounds included the duo known as “The Brothers Lin” – David Lin, grade 12, and his younger brother Jimmy Lin, grade 9.
Sorjo Banerjee, grade 11, was named as the top overall individual speaker at the tournament with five other Harker students being recognized in the top 15 overall.
Success in Minneapolis
Six middle school and 10 upper school students traveled to Apple Valley, Minn., in early November to compete at the MinneApple Debate Tournament. This is the first year Harker middle school students have competed at this high school varsity national invitational and everyone had a wonderful time!
Every team from Harker won at least one of their preliminary rounds, an especially notable accomplishment for the middle schoolers as they were the only grade 7 debaters in the pool of mostly high school juniors and seniors.
Junior Eesha Chona and Joyce Huang, grade 10, were 33rd seed and missed elimination rounds by the speaker point tie-breaker. Juniors Suraj Jagadeesh and Nikhil Bopardikar went undefeated in preliminaries and lost a close match in the first elimination round. Bopardikar was also named seventh overall individual speaker out of more than 200 speakers in the varsity division!
Abhinav Ketineni and Jasmine Liu, both grade 11, also went undefeated in prelims. They lost in the Sweet 16 as did the team of Alexander Lam, grade 10, and David Jin, grade 11. Both teams earned their first of two qualifying legs to the Tournament of Champions. Ketineni was also the ninth overall individual speaker.
Sorjo Banerjee and sophomore Emaad Raghib represented Harker all the way to the Elite Eight, losing in the quarterfinal round. They also picked up their first leg to the Tournament of Champions.
Middle School Holds Intramural Speech and Debate Tournament
On Oct. 30, 85 middle school students and their parents participated in the October Intramural Speech and Debate Tournament. Each student competed in three competitive rounds against other Harker students to practice and get a feel for what a competitive round is like. Parents and high school students volunteered as judges. The event was run in a timely fashion, with more than 50 total speech and debate rounds taking place on a Thursday evening.
A group of Harker upper school students signed on to volunteer with The Tutoring Network (TTN), a Stanford-based nonprofit organization that offers free after-school tutoring at local elementary schools.
Launched in 2008, TTN’s goal is to provide meaningful service experiences for high schoolers. For the second year in a row, Harker volunteers have tutored students at the Empire Gardens Elementary School in San Jose.
Called the Harker School-Empire Gardens Partnership, this year’s group comprises a board led by site co-directors Sadhika Malladi, grade 11, and Vienna Wang, grade 10. Joining them as board members are fellow Harker students Edward Sheu, Kristen Ko and Madison Tomihiro, all grade 11, and Allison Kiang, grade 12.
Malladi said she became interested in TTN in eighth grade, when she decided that all of her extra time should be put to good use doing community service. She went on to found the (now discontinued) Blackford Elementary School TTN site and is currently focused on growing the Empire Gardens site. In addition to serving as site co-director, Malladi helps to oversee board operations.
Wang said she began working with TTN because her sister had previously volunteered with the program. When she first joined TTN, she especially enjoyed teaching children math and watching them have fun while learning.
The commitment for the Harker TTN volunteers is two days per week, with the program running until June. The goal of improving the basic math skills of students in grades 2-5. The curriculum covered by tutors is set up by TTN volunteers and school staff.
Fourth grader Amiya Chokhawala was awarded high honors by Johns Hopkins University for being among the highest-scoring participants in its 2014 international Talent Search! The award, bestowed by the university’s Center for Talented Youth, is based on a test that measures verbal and mathematical reasoning ability. Sima Shah, Amiya’s mother, noted, “This is a result of strong community work between Harker and family.”
In 2009 Liza Turchinsky, then in grade 3, now grade 9, was recognized by the center.
Earlier this week, Rajiv Movva, grade 9, was announced as a first-place mathematics award winner in the Broadcom MASTERS competition, the finals of which took place in Washington, D.C. Movva’s project, which focused on discovering a natural method for treating type 2 diabetes, earned him a $3,500 prize, to be put toward a summer STEM experience of his choice, and an Apple iPad. “It was really an amazing experience to meet all the other finalists and compete with them,” Movva said. The prizes from the contest were not the only rewards received by the finalists. “All finalists also had a minor planet that was discovered by the MIT Lincoln Laboratory named after them, and they also announced that finalists’ teachers would get their own minor planet as well!”
Another big highlight was meeting President Barack Obama at the White House. “Obviously, meeting the President was a once-in-a-lifetime experience that we were all very excited to have,” Movva reminisced. “That being said, Broadcom MASTERS finals week as a whole was an experience too great to be justly described by words.”
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Oct. 21, 2014:
Freshman Rajiv Movva was recently named a finalist in the Broadcom MASTERS competition and will be headed to Washington D.C. on Oct. 24 for the national stage of the competition, where . “I look forward to meeting and competing with the other students who share similar interests as me!” Movva said. The national winners will be announced on Tues., Oct. 28.
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Five Harker students – the most from any school in California – are among the 300 national semifinalists in the 2014 Broadcom MASTERS program, a science and engineering competition for middle school students sponsored by the Broadcom Foundation and the Society for Science & the Public. Michael Kwan, Rajiv Movva, Anooshree Sengupta and Shaya Zarkesh, all grade 9, and Kaushik Shivakumar, grade 8, completed and submitted their projects during the 2013-14 school year; their projects were chosen from more than 6,000 nominees nationwide.
On Sept. 17, the 30 national finalists will be named. Finalists will be eligible to travel to Washington, D.C., for the final competition; the winner will receive a $25,000 prize from the Samueli Foundation.
In May, Manthra Panchapakesan, grade 12, was named the state and national first-place winner in the InvestWrite competition, put on by the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA). The annual competition, launched in 2004, presents students in grades 4-12 with an investment scenario for which they must make portfolio recommendations for both short- and long-term financial goals. As a culmination of The Stock Market Game, which is played by nearly 600,000 students nationwide, the InvestWrite competition, with 20,000 participants each year, helps students develop the know-how to make real-world financial decisions.
The 2014 Siemens Competition Math : Science : Technology semifinalists were just announced and 408 national semifinalists and 97 regional finalists were named. This year 13 students from The Harker School were among the 60 California semifinalists, representing 22 percent of the statewide total. In addition, four of those students were among the 15 named regional finalists, representing 27 percent of the regional total. More Harker students were named in both categories than any other school in California. Congratulations to the students and faculty for this outstanding achievement.
Harker’s regional finalists and their projects are:
Jason Chu, grade 12: “Studying the Nature of Dwarf Elliptical Nuclei and Globular Clusters”
Vineet Kosaraju, grade 11: “Designing Tertiary Structures with RNA Motifs in Order to Optimize 3-Dimensional RNA Folds in a Massive Open Laboratory”
Jonathan Ma and Sadhika Malladi, both grade 11: “Systematic Rational Identification of Sex-Linked Molecular Alterations and Therapies in Cancer”
These four students have each earned a $1,000 scholarship and will move on to the regional competition, held next month at the California Institute of Technology, for a chance to appear at the national finals in Washington, D.C., in December, where students will compete for up to $100,000 in scholarship prizes.
This year’s other semifinalists are:
Andrew Jin, grade 12 (“A Machine Learning Framework to Identify Selected Variants in Regions of Recent Adaptation”)
Nitya Mani, grade 12 (“Characterizing the n-Division Points of Genus-0 Curves through Straightedge and Compass Constructions”)
Neil Movva, grade 12 (“How Do Teeth Grow? Characterizing the Morphogenesis of the Periodontal Ligament through Complementary Biomechanical and Histological Analysis”)
Roshni Pankhaniya, grade 12 (“Analyzing first-Trimester MicroRNA as a Marker for Assessing Adverse Pregnancy Risk”)
Ankita Pannu, grade 12 (“Mining Online Cancer Support Groups: Improving Healthcare through Social Data”)
Nikash Shankar, grade 12 (“A Potential Therapy for Alzheimer’s Disease: Encapsulation of Curcumin within Polymeric PLGA-PEG Nanoparticles Protects Neuro2A Cells from Beta-Amyloid Induced Cytotoxicity and Improves Bioavailability”)
Alice Wu, grade 11 (“Kinematic Anomalies in the Rotation Curves of Dwarf Elliptical Galaxies”)
Rishabh Chandra, grade 11, and Venkat Sankar, grade 10 (“Managing the Impact of Infrastructure Projects on Endangered Species: A Stochastic Simulation Approach Based on Population Viability Analysis”)