As a top 10 finalist in this year’s 3M Young Scientist Challenge, eighth grader Reshma Kosaraju is eligible to win the Improving Lives Award, which is given to the project that the public believes to be the most beneficial. Voting is now open, and visitors can vote for their favorite project once a day until Oct. 25 at 5 p.m. eastern time.
June 26, 2019:
Yesterday, rising eighth grader Reshma Kosaraju was named one of the top 10 national finalists in the 2019 3M Young Scientist Challenge. Her project investigated how machine learning and neural networks could be used to predict and prevent forest fires. Each student participating in the competition submitted a video about a solution they devised for a common problem. As a finalist, Kosaraju has earned the opportunity to enter a special mentorship program, in which she will work with a 3M scientist to create a prototype of her project. She also is eligible to participate in the final competition, which will take place in late October at the 3M Innovation Center in St. Paul, Minn. The grand prize winner will receive $25,000.
In early September, the Harker Programming Club hosted the second Girls Programming League Challenge, in which 100 girls from around the Bay Area took part in a coding contest and attended talks by a wide variety of guest speakers. The event was founded as a way to encourage the pursuit of computer science among middle and high school girls. Competitions were held for both novice and advanced programmers, and a total of 16 awards were distributed among the contestants. Teams of three students each were tasked with solving a series of programming problems within a two-hour time limit.
Talks were given by Chelsea Finn, an assistant professor of computer science at Stanford and research scientist at Google Brain, and Sharon Zhou, a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University studying artificial intelligence applications for health care and climate change. A panel discussion also was held with Paige Bailey, TensorFlow product manager at Google; Qualcomm senior product marketing manager Sreeja Nair; Sue Xu, managing partner at Amino Capital; and Harker’s own upper school biology teacher Kate Schafer.
Brian Chen is headed to Washington, D.C.! Today, the freshman was named as a finalist in the 2019 Broadcom MASTERS competition. He and the other finalists will spend Oct. 25-30 in the nation’s capital, competing in the final stage of the competition, as well as meeting government officials and displaying their projects to the public. Winners will be announced on Oct. 29. Best of luck!
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Seven students were named to the Top 300 in the 2019 Broadcom MASTERS competition! Arjun Barrett, Rohan Bhowmik, Gordon Chen, Brian Chen, Jacob Huang and Nicholas Wei, all grade 9, and Reshma Kosaraju, grade 8, were selected from more than 2,300 applicants for this year’s competition. The students were selected for projects they entered in science fairs last year, when they were in middle school.
On Sept. 18, 30 of the Top 300 will be announced as finalists and will travel to Washington, D.C., in October to compete for awards and prizes totaling more than $100,000. Each year, the Society for Science & the Public selects the top 10 percent of middle school science projects submitted to society-affiliated science fairs to enter the Broadcom MASTERS competition.
In April, Harker received a visit from a group of high school girls from New Zealand in what is expected to be the start of a new collaboration to increase interest and participation in STEM among young women.
Laura Sessions, science and technology manager for the Hutt City Council in Wellington, New Zealand, organized the trip as part of the city’s Innovative Young Minds residential program, which promotes young women’s participation in STEM by holding workshops and visiting technology businesses and research institutes, among other activities. “The Innovative Young Minds program was developed as a week-long residential program for high school girls to encourage them into further studies and careers in science and technology,” Sessions said. “The Wellington program is designed to ignite their interest and excitement in the sector, but then we wanted to offer further experiences that would continue to engage students and expand their horizons.”
To this end, alumnae of the program were invited to tour the Bay Area in the spring and visit the campuses of various science and technology companies, as well as Stanford University and the California Academy of Sciences.
While preparing for the trip, Sessions reached out to Harker and was introduced to upper school science department chair Anita Chetty. Due to fortunate timing, the IYM students’ trip coincided with the 2019 Harker Research Symposium in April, and Chetty invited the group to attend the event, tour the campus and meet with one of the symposium’s keynote speakers, Surbhi Sarna ’03. “She was a very wonderful resource for these girls and a great inspiration to them,” Chetty said. While meeting with the students, Sarna discussed entrepreneurship, her experiences as a woman in technology, and the process of creating and getting patents for new technology.
“At the research symposium, I learnt through the keynote speakers and loved speaking personally to Surbhi Sarna about entrepreneurship as a woman in science,” said IYM visitor Sophie Miller of Samuel Marsden College. “I found the advice to ‘not be an entrepreneur for the sake of being an entrepreneur’ very useful. I also loved learning about permafrost thawing and the affect it has on the environment from Dr. Max Holmes. I really had no idea that the thawing of permafrost played such a massive role in releasing carbon.”
Sessions’ discussions with Harker faculty also helped secure visits to Microsoft and Nvidia, and the students also were invited to visit the upper school campus and shadow Harker students for a day to learn about their daily lives at Harker. “My impression of the Harker’s students and faculty was very positive,” Miller said. “I found that they were very interactive and eager to learn about our New Zealand culture and also share about their own cultures. Everyone was very friendly, studious and interested in why we were in Silicon Valley. I got the impression that most of the students and faculty had high ambitions and were constantly aiming for the highest.”
Students also enjoyed touring Harker’s facilities and seeing its various amenities, including the anatomy table, which Sessions called “a hit” with the guests. “Many of our students are from small, rural schools and they do not have any advanced lab equipment,” Sessions said. “One student even went away determined to find funding to buy a centrifuge for her school!”
Chetty is hoping to have representatives from Harker’s WiSTEM organization visit New Zealand in the summer of 2020, culminating in a conference that would include a panel on climate change. “I really want to have a climate change panel and invite some dignitaries to be on the panel … so that our girls can experience what the people who live and work and research there are saying about what’s happening in their part of the world,” she said.
Six Harker middle school girls were named finalists and one named a semifinalist in the 2019 ProjectCSGIRLS Competition for Middle School Girls, which encourages entrants to create technology projects that will improve people’s lives. Individual finalists were Deeya Viradia, grade 8, and Anika Pallapothu, grade 6, and team finalists were eighth graders Carol Wininger and Amiya Chokhawala and seventh graders Trisha Iyer and Anika Mantripragada. Saanvi Bhargava, grade 6, was named a semifinalist. This was the first year Harker students entered the competition.
Participants were tasked with creating a computer science or technology project that addressed a social problem in the categories of health, world safety, intelligent technology or inequality. Finalists are eligible to attend the ProjectCSGIRLS National Gala, which will be held June 8-9 in the Washington, D.C., metro area. National winners will be announced at this event, which also will include notable speakers and workshops.
In mid-May, junior Allison Jia was named one of two winners of the Intel Foundation Young Scientist Award at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair! Jia’s project, which studied proteins associated with neurodegenerative diseases, won her a $50,000 prize! It also was named Best in Category for cell and molecular biology and won a First Award, earning Jia an additional $5,000 and $1,000, respectively.
Senior Ruhi Sayana also did well at the fair, winning a $10,000 scholarship from the Drug, Chemical & Associated Technologies Association for her project in the biomedical and health sciences category, in which she also won a $1,000 Third Award from Intel ISEF and a $500 Second Award from the Ashtavadhani Vidwan Ambati Subbaraya Chetty Foundation. In the computational biology and informatics category, junior Cynthia Chen received a Third Award of $1,000. All three students won trips to the Intel ISEF at the Synopsys Silicon Valley Science & Technology Championship in March.
Jia’s efforts were writtten up in several publications:
Freshmen David Dai and Rishab Parthasarathy were recently selected to be two of 20 high school students on the 2019 U.S. Physics Team. Each year, the American Association of Physics Teachers selects team members from the top scorers on the USA Physics Exam, who are then invited to a boot camp at the University of Maryland, College Park. Five of these students will then be chosen for the traveling team for the International Physics Olympiad in Tel Aviv, Israel.
In one of its best-attended years to date, the Harker Research Symposium attracted about 800 visitors from across the Harker community to recognize the school’s dedication to the sciences and encourage sustainable lifestyles and policies.
Sustainability was the main theme of this year’s event, which fittingly began with upper school vocal groups Cantilena and Camerata performing J. David Moore’s “We Belong to the Earth” under the direction of music teacher Susan Nace. The first keynote speaker was Max Holmes, deputy director and senior climate scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center, whose talk detailed how the behavior of rivers around the world can offer insight into global climate change.
Sustainability themes also were prevalent at the exhibitors area at the Nichols Hall atrium, which remained a popular attraction throughout the day. A student-run booth detailing the ways in which people can make their lives more environment-friendly greeted visitors as they walked through the front doors of Nichols Hall, alongside booths showcasing marine life, new technologies and the crucial role bees play in our daily lives (as well as the dangers presented by their decreasing populations).
At the Nichols Hall auditorium, a panel of Harker graduates shared their career retrospectives, including how their time at Harker influenced their trajectories and crucial lessons learned through their experiences. “Your career path is going to be windy and you’re going to be meeting a ton of…different people along the way,” said Shephalie Lahri ’05, associate director of marketing and reimbursement at the genetic testing company Natera. “Carve your own path and make sure you have the right advocates and champions,” she advised. The Nichols Hall rotunda was also busy, as upper school students at the Stem Buddies stations showed young science lovers how to purify water, create a DNA helix and find microplastics in ocean water.
The auxiliary gym once again hosted middle and upper school poster presentations, as students explained and answered questions on their research on a variety of topics, including zoology, physics and social science.
Surbhi Sarna ’03 returned to the Harker Research Symposium as this year’s alumna keynote speaker, giving a talk on her journey from being a patient at the age of 13 to becoming a medical technology entrepreneur and developing a device for early detection of ovarian cancer. Her company, nVision Medical, was purchased by Boston Scientific for $275 million last April.
This year’s afternoon keynote was given by David Haussler, an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical institute and distinguished professor of biomolecular engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Haussler took the afternoon audience on an “Odyssey in to the Human Genome,” examining the field of genomics and how the human genome has evolved.
The Society for Science & the Public announced the 40 finalists for this year’s Regeneron Science Talent Search, and three Harker seniors are among those named! They (and their projects) are:
Ayush Alag, “Computational DNA Methylation Analysis of Food Allergy Yields Novel 13-gene Signature to Diagnose Clinical Reactivity”
Natasha Maniar, “MapAF: Deep Learning to Improve Therapy of Complex Human Heart Rhythm Abnormalities”
Ruhi Sayana, “Precision Care for Leukemia: Discovery of Novel Therapeutics for High-Risk ALL via Epigenetic and Computational Transcriptome Profiling”
Each of these students will head to Washington, D.C., in early March for the national finals.
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Jan. 9, 2019:
Seven Harker seniors – the most of any school in California – were named Top 300 Scholars in this year’s Regeneron Science Talent Search, the Society for Science & the Public announced today. Ayush Alag, Cameron Jones, Natasha Maniar, Ruhi Sayana, Katherine Tian, Cindy Wang and Richard Wang were among 300 students chosen from the 2,000 entries in this year’s competition. Each will receive a $2,000 prize, and Harker will be awarded an additional $2,000, as will every school that produced a Top 300 Scholar.
This year’s 40 finalists will be announced on Jan. 23, and in March they will embark on an all-expenses-paid trip to Washington, D.C., for the final portion of the competition, during which more than $1.8 million in prizes will be awarded. Congratulations and best of luck to these stellar students!
July 9, 2019
Update: Over the last year, Alag has received numerous kudos for his research, including having his work published in both Smithsonian Magazine and PLOS, a professional research journal:
Nov. 29, 2018
Over the summer, senior Ayush Alag received a $10,000 grant from genetic research company Illumina to continue his research into food allergies, which led to the creation of his own company, Allergezy. The company aims to develop a safe and accurate means of genetic testing for allergies. Alag’s original research, which he pursued due to his own experiences with food allergies, was the basis for the project he submitted for the 2018 Synopsys Science & Technology Championship, which won a first award in the bioinformatics category. Recently, Alag was selected to give a poster presentation at the American Medical Informatics Association’s 2019 Informatics Summit in March, an opportunity typically reserved for medical professionals and graduate students. More information about Allergezy, its team and its mission can be found on the company’s website, which is maintained by Alag’s brother, Shray, Allergezy’s VP of marketing and web design.