Six Harker seniors — Dominque Dabija, Daniel Kim, Elena Madan, Anand Natarajan, Vikram Nathan, and Denzil Sikka — have been named semifinalists in Intel’s Science Talent Search. This represents the highest number of semifinalists a single California school has produced since the contest began.
The students each received $1,000 for this milestone, and are now eligible to win the $100,000 grand prize.
There were only 25 semifinalists in California, out of 300 nationwide. Over 1,600 students submitted entries. Harker winners’ research covered a wide array of subjects, from “Computational Methods for Identifying Functionally Important Residues Involved in Allosteric Communication Pathways” (Dabija’s) to “Novel Quantitative Models of Reaction Kinetics” (Nathan’s). In 2006, Harker’s Yi Sun (’06) went on to the nationals, taking second place and winning $75,000.
The Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology has announced its 2008-09 semifinalists, and Harker has a total of six, one of only two schools on the West Coast to have that many, and the only one in Northern California. Congratulations to Rahul Ahuja, Dominique Dabija, Elena Madan, Vikram Nathan, Nikhil Raghuram and Andrew Stanek, all Gr. 12.
Harker had the highest percentage of semifinalists from among all the schools in California, with twice the number per class size as the second and third schools.
The Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology is designed to recognize talent early on and foster individual growth through science research. It is administered by The College Board and funded by the Siemens Foundation.
Student projects are judged on creativity, field knowledge, comprehensiveness, interpretation, literature review (source citation), scientific importance, future work (follow-up or applications), clarity of expression and presentation. About 300 projects nationwide were chosen as semifinalists. After that, up to thirty students and thirty teams are chosen to compete at six regional competitions. Harker began submitting projects to this competition in 2005-06, and had one semifinalist that inaugural year. In both 2006-07 and 2007-08, Harker fielded four semifinalists.