Last week, Simar Bajaj ‘20 gave a presentation to Harker students to expand on the points made in an essay he co-wrote that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in January. In the piece, he and Dr. Fatima Stanford argue that distrust of COVID-19 vaccinations among Black Americans is the result of decades of systemic racism built into the medical profession, and that too much attention is focused on well-known incidents such as the Tuskegee syphilis study to explain hesitancy among Black Americans to accept the vaccines.
While the horrors of these incidents should not be forgotten, Bajaj said, “you know what challenges you’re facing through the health care institution if you’re a Black individual, especially during this pandemic, which has highlighted a lot of inequities.” Many studies have shown that Black patients are misdiagnosed and are refused treatment and painkillers at much higher rates.
“If you are a Black man in the emergency department and the doctor … is not giving you your painkillers, even though you’re visibly in pain,” Bajaj said. “In those moments … perhaps you are thinking about Tuskegee and historicizing your frustrations there, but perhaps more likely you are thinking about the racist doctor that’s not giving you your painkillers.”
Bajaj said an approach known as “barbershop-based intervention” could help build trust among Black Americans. These interactions, in which Black patients are cared for by Black health care professionals, provide racial concordance that has had very positive outcomes. In one study, barbershop-based intervention brought the blood pressure of 64 percent of Black men to normal levels, compared to just 12 percent of the control group who continued to visit their primary physician. “Barbershops are often forums of camaraderie for Black individuals,” Bajaj said. “There’s this relationship between the barber and those getting their hair cut that is very close.”
He also cited research performed by Dr. Stanford that demonstrated an increased interest in seeking information when COVID prevention messages were delivered by Black physicians. “There’s a lot of information being thrown at us during the pandemic, a lot of which is incredibly important to understand and lot of which can impact health literacy,” Bajaj said. “So you can see the implications here.”
Lay press coverage that zeroes in on Tuskegee and other historical atrocities, Bajaj said, can also further the damaging idea that racism in medicine is mostly in the past. “I found it incredibly frustrating when I would read these lay press articles where they’d try to [explain that] Black individuals don’t trust the vaccine because of Tuskegee or because of J. Marion Sims or because of this or that,” he said. “And I thought such a framing is incorrect and harmful.”
Two Harker teams claimed top spots in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Regional High School Science Bowl, held Feb. 6. Team One – made up of juniors David Dai, Harsh Deep, Rishab Parthasarathy and William Zhao, and sophomore Jeremy Ko – placed second overall, and Team Two – seniors Michael Eng and Russell Yang, sophomore Rohan Bhowmik, and freshmen Gautam Bhooma and Nicholas Wei – placed in the top eight, the only second team to get that far in the tournament.
This competition, usually held at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, took place virtually this year. Each team was placed in a Zoom room and tasked with answering 18 questions, with each team playing three rounds at the start and the top 24 teams advancing to the elimination rounds.
Simar Bajaj ‘20, now in his first year at Harvard, was recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the most prestigious peer-reviewed medical journals. His piece, co-authored with Fatima Stanford, a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, examines the relationship between systemic racism and the reluctance in Black communities to accept COVID-19 vaccines. Reasons cited include the persistence of wrong diagnoses and denial of necessary treatment for Black Americans. The article also proposes that Black health experts be the directors of messaging to Black communities to increase trust of the vaccine.
Today, the Society for Science & the Public announced that seniors Shray Alag, Saloni Shah, Aditya Tadimeti and Sidra Xu were named four of the top 300 scholars in the 2021 Regeneron Science Talent Search. Nearly 1,800 applications from 611 high schools were submitted for this year’s competition. Each of the 300 scholars will be awarded a $2,000 cash prize, and their schools will receive a $2,000 prize for each scholar to fund STEM-related education. This year’s top 40 finalists will be announced Jan. 21.
Senior Hari Bhimaraju recently published a paper in the Biometrics & Biostatistics International Journal, a peer-reviewed journal specializing in biological sciences and public health. Her paper, titled “Low-cost enhancement of facial mask filtration to prevent transmission of COVID-19,” examines a variety of low-cost masks to determine their effectiveness in containing the spread of COVID-19. “COVID-19 disproportionately affects people in low-income communities, who often lack the resources to acquire appropriate personal protective equipment and tend to lack the flexibility to shelter in place due to their public-facing occupations,” reads the abstract to the paper.
Bhimaraju’s research was part of a summer internship, but due to safety concerns, she had to conduct all of her research at home. “This is a great example of how resourceful our students are in creating independent research opportunities for themselves,” said Anita Chetty, upper school science chair. “But moreover, this is of course a very important piece of work that has societal implications.”
Junior Riyaa Randhawa was recently published in The Milbank Quarterly, a peer-reviewed journal that covers health care policy. The paper, written during a summer internship with Harold Pollack of the University of Chicago, argues that the United States and countries in Central and South America must work together to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Even though this was not a straight science paper, a lot of the skills I used throughout the process of writing this paper were from [upper school science teacher Chris Spenner’s] class,” she said. “The practice and real research papers I wrote in class…really benefited me here!”
Last week, Dr. Abigail Joseph, middle school learning, innovation and design (LID) director, was appointed to the Computer Science Teachers Association’s Board of Directors. Together with the appointment Charity Freeman of Chicago’s Lane Tech College Prep High School, Abigail noted, this decision “is the continuation of a shift that CSTA is deliberately making to change the face of computer science education so that more marginalized groups are granted access to CS education and opportunities to participate in the world in which they live.”
Joseph has been involved with the CSTA since 2012, when she was a computer science teacher at the middle school, and co-founded the San Mateo County chapter in 2015. Last year, Joseph was part of the inaugural cohort of the CSTA’s Equity Fellowship, helping introduce computer science to teachers in other disciplines.
“I have been involved with various organizations help to encourage more non-CS teachers to learn about computer science and integrate it into their discipline,” said Joseph. “I have enjoyed working with teachers in that capacity and focused my Equity Fellowship project on developing professional learning opportunities to demystify computer science for non-CS teachers.” Working with the Connie L. Lurie College of Education at San Jose State University, Abigail gave computer science education workshops “to shift perspectives on what computer science is and why CS education is an equity issue that all teachers should care about.”
Joseph said she is looking forward to bringing awareness to equity issues in computer science education in her position on the board. “As a board member, I hope to bring voice to those that do not normally have the opportunity to share opinions about systems that create inequities and access in the field of CS and CS education,” she said. “It is important that a diverse array of perspectives are accounted for when systems and policies are created in any organization.”
Last week, freshman Sriram Bhimaraju received the third place Wells Fargo Community Innovation Award in Arizona State University’s Sustainability Solutions Science Fair at the middle school level. Bhimaraju’s project is an app called Saagara: Sunscreen Advisors, which checks the ingredients of sunscreen brands to determine if they are a threat to coral reefs. In addition to the app, Bhimaraju also devised a method for removing water pollution that employs beads that absorb polluting chemicals in water.
Bhimaraju has been offered a mentorship opportunity with ASU’s Rob and Melani Walton Sustainability Solutions Service, which will display his work in a future webinar. More than 600 entries were received for the fair since June. In addition to mentorship opportunities, winners also received up to $2,500 in cash prizes.
Senior Shray Alag had his research published yesterday by PLOS One, an international peer-reviewed scientific journal from the Public Library of Science, an open-access science publisher. Alag’s research, titled “Analysis of COVID-19 clinical trials: A data-driven, ontology-based, and natural language processing approach,” explored how application programming interfaces (APIs) could be used to make data from COVID-19 clinical trials – which have exploded since the start of the pandemic – much more accessible, thereby aiding medical professionals, researchers and the general public.
Today, eighth grader Anika Pallapothu was named one of the top 30 finalists in the 2020 Broadcom MASTERS program. Her project, titled “Predict Using AI: Diagnosing of Diabetic Eye Diseases Using Convolutional Neural Networks for Computer Vision,” details how artificial intelligence can be used to detect diabetic retinopathy, the disease that is the leading cause of blindness. As a finalist, Pallapothu is eligible to participate in the Virtual Broadcom MASTERS event, which takes place Oct. 16-21.
——-
Sept. 3, 2020:
Yesterday, the Society for Science & the Public announced that 15 Harker students – a school record – are among the top 300 contestants in the 2020 Broadcom MASTERS program, one of the top middle school science competitions in the country. The Top 300 MASTERS entered the competition during the 2019-20 school year by being nominated at a science fair affiliated with the Society for Science & the Public.
Ninth graders Gautam Bhooma, Zachary Blue, Ramit Goyal, Jordan Labio, Ella Lan, Heidi Lu, Anika Maji, Anika Mantripragada and Ananya Sriram; eighth grader Anika Pallapothu; seventh graders Hubert Lau, Serena Lau, Brenna Ren, Kallie Wang and Carissa Wu each received a prize package that includes $125 from DoD STEM and a subscription to Science News magazine. The 30 finalists in this year’s competition will be announced Sept. 16. The final stage of the competition is being held virtually this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.