On Friday, the Siemens Foundation announced the regional finalists and semifinalists in this year’s Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology. Two Harker students, Steven Wang and Andrew Jin, both grade 11, were named regional finalists this year for their joint research project. Harker’s 10 regional semifinalists are: seniors Aditya Batra, Stephanie Chen, Zareen Choudhury, Varun Mohan and Srikar Pyda, and juniors Matthew Huang, Helen Wu, Stanley Xie (joint project with Helen Wu), Samyukta Yagati and Andrew Zhang. This marks the third consecutive year that Harker has had at least two regional finalists in the Siemens competition. Harker had six semifinalists and four regional finalists in 2012, and six semifinalists and two regional finalists in 2011.
In another record year for the Siemens Competition, 2,440 students took part in the 2013 competition, to which 1,559 projects were submitted. Of those, 331 semifinalists and 100 regional finalists were chosen.
Each regional finalist receives a $1,000 scholarship and advances to one of the regional competitions held in November. Winners from the regional competitions then move on to the national finals in Washington, D.C., held Dec. 6-7 at George Washington University.
This article was originally published in the summer 2013 Harker Quarterly.
This past spring, upper school chemistry instructor Rachel Freed headed off to the annual National Association of Research in Science Teaching conference in Puerto Rico. She was invited to attend the conference with a group from Sonoma State University with whom she had previously worked as a research technician.
Freed and her research team presented a paper detailing their findings on student learning and understanding in chemistry, with a focus on misconceptions. She served as project manager of the study, which was sponsored by FACET Innovations, a Seattle-based educational research and development company dedicated to the improvement of learning and teaching in science from elementary through graduate school – what educators call K-20.
“We designed an online formative assessment system (available free at Diagnoser.com) which gives teachers all of the necessary components to integrate formative assessment into their chemistry curricula. A key aspect is the sets of ’diagnose questions,’ with very specific information on exactly what misconceptions their students have within a given topic,” she explained.
In addition to participating in the research, design and creation of the online system, in the summer of 2011 Freed helped train six pilot teachers on formative assessment and the implementation of the system. She then followed them throughout the year, conducting classroom visits and weekly teleconferences to help them use the program and obtain feedback. The project was done in collaboration with researchers at SRI (Stanford Research International) in Menlo Park and FACET Innovations.
“While I was there I met a handful of colleagues with whom I have established relationships for future collaborations. One in particular shared ideas with me on how to teach oxidation-reduction reactions and the research she is doing with her college students. I have already used some of these ideas with my classes here at Harker, and I hope to contribute to her data in the future from my own classroom experiences,” said Freed.
On June 7, Harker student Dolan Dworak, grade 7, and upper school science teacher Kate Schafer will head to the Alaskan coastline to take part in an expedition kickstarted by the Anchorage Museum and the Alaska SeaLife Center, which will be the subject of a Web series planned by National Geographic. Dworak and Schafer will be part of an international team of scientists and artists that will observe the effects of garbage islands on marine life. The work performed during this expedition will later be turned into an exhibition at the Anchorage Museum called GYRE, which will appear at museums throughout the United States.
Dworak, who has spent three years working with the San Francisco-based Sea Scavenger Conservancy to help clean up the earth’s oceans, will act as the expedition’s social media coordinator at the Alaska SeaLife Center, located in Seward. Schafer, who has a background in marine biology and a passion for observing the effects of human activity on ocean ecosystems, will help develop the educational portions of the GYRE exhibition with the Anchorage Museum in preparation for the exhibition’s launch in February 2014.
Harker’s eighth annual Research Symposium drew more than 400 attendees, who marveled at the many exhibits, student presentations, breakout sessions and guest speakers that have made the symposium into one of the school’s signature events, unique for being organized largely by the student-run WiSTEM, chemistry, research and Sci Fy clubs.
The upper school campus was abuzz with activity as early as 8 a.m., when the symposium officially began. One of the busiest areas for the entire day was the Nichols Hall atrium and rotunda, where exhibitors such as Google, Ericsson and Symmetricom offered demonstrations of their products and talked with attendees, in addition to providing a mere glimpse at the wealth of career opportunities available to students of the sciences.
One of the more impressive pieces of technology on display was Anatomage’s “virtual cadaver,” a 3-D rendering of a human body that could be examined in amazing detail via a large touch screen, enabling classrooms without access to a real cadaver to study the human body up close.
Elsewhere in the atrium, SeaLife Aquarium Maintenance presented various sea creatures for visitors to view and handle. East Bay Cardiovascular and Thoracic Associates, represented by Harker parent Murali Duran (Rohan, grade 9; Lea, grade 11; Roshan, grade 12), had a heart station set up where visitors could learn how to perform sutures using store-bought pig hearts.
A large portion of the event was devoted to formal talks, also known as breakout sessions, delivered by Harker students. In these talks, students gave presentations on scientific research projects that they had done, many of which earned the students finalist or semifinalist placings in the Siemens Competition and the Intel Science Talent Search. In addition to demonstrating the high level of research being conducted by the students, these sessions also offered students the chance to show their research to (and take questions from) members of the greater scientific community.
The breakout sessions covered a wide variety of topics. Ashvin Swaminathan, grade 12, presented an analysis of surreal numbers, for which he was named an Intel Science Talent Search semifinalist and a Siemens Competition regional finalist. At another session, senior Rohan Chandra, another Siemens regional finalist, discussed the brain’s reaction to various features of Beethoven’s famous fifth symphony. Meanwhile, Siemens semifinalists Anika Gupta and Saachi Jain, both grade 11, presented their research on how an uncharacterized gene may have a hand in lowering the risk of ulcers and gastric cancer.
Middle school students also had their chance to shine, showing the results of their work with the many impressive poster presentations set up in the gym. The enthusiasm of these students was evident as they explained their projects and their implications to the fascinated passersby.
As always, the lunchtime chemistry magic show was a treat for the midday audience, who oohed and aahed at brilliant flames, exploding eggs, liquid-carbon-frozen bananas and other wonders of chemistry, as they enjoyed food freshly prepared by Harker’s kitchen staff.
Also during lunch was a special talk by Nikita Sinha ’09, currently in her senior year at the California Institute of Technology, who discussed the research she was conducting for her senior thesis, as well as the life experiences that led her to choose medical research as a career.
The first of the keynote speakers at the symposium was Dr. Kristian Hargadon, assistant professor of biology at Hampden-Sydney College. Hargadon took the morning audience on a journey through his progression from a young student athlete with dreams of being an NBA star to becoming a decorated cancer researcher, in addition to discussing some of his current work.
Surbhi Sarna ’03, this year’s alumni speaker, shared her story with the early afternoon audience. After suffering from an ovarian cyst in her early teens, Sarna became determined to create better conditions in the field of female health. Toward this end, she founded the venture-backed nVision Medical in 2009 to develop technology that will help gynecologists more quickly detect ovarian cancer.
This year’s featured speaker was Nobel Prize-winning biologist Dr. David Baltimore, whose work at the California Institute at Technology has recently yielded a method for preventing the spread of HIV. Baltimore provided an overview of how his process of injecting a harmless virus containing antibodies into the muscles of mice prevented HIV infection. Baltimore and his team are currently preparing to test this process in humans.
Another highlight of the event was a special panel of notable women in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), which included such inspirational figures as Barbara Jones, project manager at the IBM Almaden Research Center; Monica Kumar, senior director of product marketing at Oracle; Tian Zhang, senior software engineer at IBM; and alumna Sinha.
The panel discussed the increasingly important role of women in the sciences, offering their insights into their respective fields as well as advice to the audience of young attendees on how to transform their love of science into successful careers.
The symposium closed with a panel of students and teachers providing students and parents with information on Harker’s research program and the various opportunities available, such as the Siemens and Intel contests, internships and research classes.
It was again a successful year at the Synopsys Championship for Harker middle and upper school students. Andrew Jin, grade 10, in the bioinformatics category, and Anika Radia-Dixit, grade 12, in medicine/health/gerontology, were both awarded grand prizes and an expenses-paid trip to the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, which takes place May 12-17 in Phoenix, Ariz. Venkat Sankar, grade 8, received a middle school special prize and a trip to the California State Fair in Los Angeles for his project in the environmental sciences category.
Harker was also named one of the top three high schools at the event, and upper school science teacher Chris Spenner was one of the top three high school teachers. Thomas Artiss, middle school science teacher, was named most promising new teacher.
A total of 26 upper school students were winners of various awards at this year’s contest. In the biochemistry/microbiology category, Sriram Somasundaram, grade 10, earned a First Award, while classmate Stanley Xie won a Second Award along with Pranav Reddy, also grade 10, who also received an Honorable Mention Certificate of Achievement from MedImmune.
Rohith Bhethanabotla, grade 11,won a First Award in chemistry, while fellow junior Mercedes Chien received a Second Award in the same category. Freshmen Rishabh Chandra and Jonathan Ma and juniors Avinash Nayak and Shreyas Parthasarathy all won Second Awards in physics.
Rishabh Jain, grade 10, won a second award in computers/mathematics as well as a First Place award from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, which included a certificate and programmable robot. In the same category, Cindy Liu, grade 10, earned an Honorable Mention, and juniors Brian Tuan and Andrew Wang each received Honorable Mention Student Awards and certificates from the Association for Computing Machinery.
In earth/space sciences, senior Andrew Luo received a Second Award, and junior Stephanie Chen and sophomore Matthew Huang each received Certificates of Achievement from the NASA Ames Research Center.
Neil Movva, grade 10, earned several recognitions in engineering, including a First Award, a Certificate of Achievement and $50 voucher from the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps, an Honorable Mention from the U.S. Army and a Special Award from Varian Medical Systems, which included a $75 cash prize and a Certificate of Achievement. In the same category, Ramakrishnan Menon, grade 12, received a Second Award, was named a second-place student by the American Vacuum Society and was awarded a $50 cash prize and a Certificate of Achievement. Michael Kling, grade 11, also received a Second Award in this category and a Certificate of Achievement and Pewter Medallion Voucher from the Yale Science and Engineering Association. Yet another winner in engineering was Alison Rugar, grade 12, who earned a Third Place Award from A Society for Materials which included a $50 prize, a subscription to Popular Science magazine and a Certificate of Achievement. Finally, Avi Agarwal, grade 11, received an Honorable Mention.
In addition to Andrew Jin’s Grand Prize, the bioinformatics category also saw Steven Wang, grade 10, earn a First Award and a first place $150 cash prize and Certificate of Achievement and an award from the University of California, San Francisco Center for Systems and Synthetic Biology.
Other upper school winners were juniors Daniel Pak and Christopher Fu, who both received Second Awards in Zoology, senior Suchita Nety, who received a First Award in medicine/health/gerontology and sophomore Nikash Shankar, also a First Award winner in medicine/health/gerontology, who also won a second place prize of $200 from Rambus, honorable mention from MedImmune and an invite to the California States Science Fair.
The middle school had 16 students winning awards this year, including grade 8 students Avi Khemani and Manan Shah, who earned First Awards, and Jonathan Liu and Justin Xie, also both grade 8, who received Honorable Mentions in biochemistry/microbiology. In engineering, eighth graders Peter Wu, David Zhu and Amrita Singh all won Second Awards, with Singh also receiving a Certificate of Achievement and lapel pin from the National Society of Professional Engineers. Sandip Nirmel, also grade 8, received a Family and Friends membership from the Tech Museum of Innovation.
Eighth graders Aditya Dhar and Arjun Subramaniam each won Second Awards in computers/mathematics and Meena Gudapati, grade 7, won a First Award in behavioral/social. In the same category, grade 8 students Joyce Huang, Meilan Steimle and Swetha Tummala all earned Second Awards.
Grade 8 student Andrew Gu’s project in the botany category earned him a First Award, and Evani Radiya-Dixit, grade 8, was named a middle school Top Finalist for her medicine/health/gerontology project.
Congratulations to all the winners, and good luck next year!
This article was originally published in the spring 2013 Harker Quarterly.
Sarah Howells ’12, now a freshman at Princeton University, recently won a prestigious new award. “The history department is delighted to congratulate Sarah on winning first prize in the Churchill Research Paper competition,” said Donna Gilbert, Harker’s history department chair. The competition is sponsored by the University of Minnesota’s Churchill Center.
Howells is the contest’s first winner, and it’s not the only first that she has earned for the paper, titled “Winston Churchill’s Efforts to Unify Britain from 1940-1941.” It was also Howells’ submission to earn a grant from the Mitra Family Endowment, which was established last year by Harker parents Samir and Sundari Mitra (Shivani, grade 12). Howells went on to become the first Mitra Scholar for her entry.
“I was pretty surprised, since this being the first year of the competition I was not sure what the expectations were,” Howells said. “I would like to thank the Mitra family for supporting humanities research at Harker, Ms. [Donna] Gilbert, Dr. [Ruth] Meyer and Ms. [Susan] Smith for helping me with research and making the Harker history department a strong supporter of independent work, and Ms. [Julie] Wheeler for convincing me to apply for the grant in the first place.”
The Mitra Family Endowment for the Humanities matches gifts to the annual giving campaign up to a total of $100,000.
“The subject matters taught under humanities such as history, languages, communications and philosophy are critical skills and knowledge that develop well-rounded Harker students,” said Samir Mitra, speaking at last year’s reception. “Humanities is the bedrock of a superior education and will enable our students to stand out as recognized contributors in their future professions.”
“I knew I wanted to apply for the Mitra grant because I had enjoyed world history so much in my sophomore year,” said Howells. “I thought about Britain; my family was affected on two sides by World War II, both in Poland and in Britain.”
Too broad at first, her topic choices “quickly narrowed to Churchill’s remarkable unification of the government and retaining the trust of the people during the war,” said Howells, noting that the most interesting part of writing the paper was transitioning from the researching to the writing.
Felix Wu, grade 10, is among the top 10 finalists in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library’s Profiles in Courage Essay Contest. The essay, which profiles Dennis Kucinich, former member of the U.S. House of Representatives, was one of 8,000 submitted for the contest. After four rounds of judging, during which it was reportedly reviewed by a number of U.S. senators, it was declared one of the 10 best. Wu will be awarded $500 and a signed copy of Caroline Kennedy’s book, “Profiles in Courage,” for reaching this stage of the contest. The judge who informed Wu of his achievement recommended that he send the essay to Kucinich, which he has plans to do.
In February, several members of the Harker chapter of the Triple Helix, an international organization that publishes scientific articles by university students, headed to England to attend this year’s Triple Helix conference at Cambridge University. Harker journalism has the full story. Harker became the first high school to charter a chapter of the Triple Helix in 2011.
Society for Science announced Wednesday that Paulomi Bhattacharya, grade 12, has been named one of 40 finalists in this year’s Intel Science Talent Search, becoming the first Harker student to be named an Intel STS finalist and a Siemens contest finalist in the same year. Bhattacharya, who was also a Siemens finalist last year, “is a classic example of a student who has gone through our whole research program,” said science department chair Anita Chetty.
Bhattacharya found the inspiration for her project, titled “A Novel AAA-ATPase p97/VCP Inhibitor Lead for Multiple Myeloma by Fragment-Based Drug Design: A Computational Binding Model and NMR/SPR-Based Validation,” while interviewing for a position at the California Institute of Quantitative Biosciences at Univeristy of California, San Francisco, last year. “As I discussed possible projects with my professor, he mentioned a post-doctoral research group in the department that was working on a National Cancer Institute-funded project,” she said. “But the target protein was proving to be very difficult, and even after a year they had few significant results.”
Eager to help and seeking a new experience, Bhattacharya joined the team and began working on one of three unexplored drug target regions. “I designed an independent project and worked separately from the group throughout the summer, reading background literature, learning the molecular modeling techniques, using NMR/SPR spectroscopies, and learning the underlying theories of physics and chemistry,” she said.
In choosing the project, Bhattacharya expressed her desire to add to the field of cancer research. “I know far too many who have fought cancer without success,” she said. “Consequently, I jumped at the opportunity to pursue a cure for multiple myeloma. The cause that I was fighting for strengthened my resolve to creatively make an impact by scientific advancement.”
In addition to her success in these contests, Bhattacharya has also been an active member of Women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (WiSTEM) and other clubs, written for the Triple Helix Online and presented at the Harker Research Symposium on multiple occasions. “She represents a student who has taken advantage of not only the clubs, but of internships, research classes and the many other opportunities available to her in the research program,” Chetty said.
Bhattacharya has expressed her thanks to the many Harker teachers in various programs and disciplines who have supported and mentored her since she started at Harker in grade 5, including lower school history teacher Pat Walsh, middle school math teacher Vandana Kadam, middle school biology teacher Lorna Claerbout, middle school history teacher Cyrus Merrill, upper school science department teachers Chetty, Mala Raghavan, Chris Spenner, Robbie Korin and Richard Page and math teacher Victor Adler.
She also mentioned her sincere gratitude to her professor at UCSF, Dr. Matthew Jacobs, “for giving me the opportunity to work with him in this emerging field,” and her post-doctoral mentor at UCSF, Dr. Michael Chimenti, for offering his guidance to her throughout the project.
The semifinalists, all grade 12, are Paulomi Bhattacharya (“A Novel AAA-ATPase p97/VCP Inhibitor Lead for Multiple Myeloma by Fragment-Based Drug Design: A Computational Binding Model and NMR/SPR-Based Validation”), Deniz Celik (“Computation of the Cell Phone-Induced SAR Distribution in a 3D Multi-Layered Model of the Human Head/Brain using Finite Element Analysis”), Jenny Chen (“RNAi of Rec12 in Schizosaccharomyces pombe: The Effect of Meiotic Recombination Inhibition on Fungicide Resistance”), who performed all of her research at Harker, Andrew Luo (“The Kinematics of Andromeda’s Diffuse Ionized Gas Disk”), Payal Modi (“Understanding the Chemical Inhomogeneities in Globular Clusters: Examining M4 and M5 for Trends in Elemental Abundances”) and Ashvin Swaminathan (“Surreal Analysis: An Analogue of Real Analysis for Surreal Numbers”).
A total of 26 students submitted projects for this year’s contest, each student spending countless hours doing research, writing and refining in preparation, with much help and encouragement from their mentor teachers in Harker’s science department.
“We could not be more proud that our students were recognized for the culminating efforts of their entire research process,” said Jennifer Gargano, assistant head of school for academic affairs. “The process reflects so much of who we strive to be – our students putting forth great efforts to deeply learn about and understand a topic they are truly interested in.”
The semifinalists each received a $1,000 prize and a chance to head to Washington, D.C., for the final stages of the contest, the winner of which will receive $100,000. More information about the semifinalists will appear on Society for Science’s Facebook page in the coming weeks. The finalists will be announced Jan. 23.