Last month, Alice Feng, grade 9, and Sriram Bhimaraju, grade 7, were announced as winners in this year’s Broadcom MASTERS competition. Feng won a STEM Award in the engineering category for her project, “The Effect of Mushroom Species and Substrates on the Properties of a Novel Biodegradable Material: Mycelium,” which earned her an iPad and $3,500 to attend a STEM summer camp of her choice. Bhimaraju’s project, “Low-Cost Archery Assistant with an Interface for the Visually Impaired,” won the Rising Star Award, which netted him a trip to Phoenix to attend the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in May of next year as a Broadcom MASTERS International Official Observer. In recognition of their hard work and achievements, each student also received a certificate of recognition from U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris.
Last weekend, Harker’s upper school National Science Bowl team A qualified for the national finals after going undefeated in the regional competition at Stanford’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. The team comprises seniors Swapnil Garg, Rajiv Movva, Derek Yen and Shaya Zarkesh, and sophomore Emily Liu, all coached by Gary Blickenstaff. This marks the second straight year Harker has qualified for the national finals.
Utilizing a game show format with a buzzer system, the National Science Bowl tests student knowledge on a variety of topics, including biology, chemistry, mathematics and physics. The competition was established in 1991 by the United States Department of Energy with the goal of “making math and science fun for students to encourage them to pursue studies and careers in math and science,” according to the NSB website.
This year’s national finals are set to take place April 26-30 in Washington, D.C.
Update, Feb. 14: SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory’s Michael Ross recently posted a recap of the Feb. 3 competition that includes more details about the event, such as the app created by a Stanford Online High School student that was of great use to competitors that weekend.
Over the winter break, senior Swapnil Garg and junior Katherine Tian were covered by the San Jose Mercury News for their performance in the 2017 Siemens Competition, which earned them a trip to the national finals in December.
Nov. 6, 2017:
Swapnil Garg, grade 12, and Katherine Tian, grade 11, are off to the Siemens Competition national finals! Their project – titled “Automated Clear Cell Renal Carcinoma Grade Classification with Prognostic Significance” – was selected as one of six team projects that will be considered for top honors at the final stage of the competition, held Dec. 4-5 in Washington, D.C. There, the two students will be eligible to win up to $100,000 in scholarship prizes, split evenly between them. As finalists, the pair are guaranteed a minimum $25,000 prize.
Oct. 18, 2017:
Congratulations to senior Swapnil Garg and junior Katherine Tian, who were just named two of the 101 regional finalists in this year’s Siemens Competition! They each will receive a $1,000 scholarship prize and are eligible to compete at the regional finals for the opportunity to advance to the National Finals in Washington, D.C. Best of luck!
Oct. 17, 2017:
Today, the Siemens Foundation named 10 Harker students regional semifinalists in the 2017 Siemens Competition in Math, Science & Technology, the most from any California school. Each year, individual and team research projects from six regions are selected to be semifinalists.
Harker’s semifinalists in the 2017 competition are Cynthia Chen and Jin Tuan, grade 10; Erin Liu, Ashwin Rammohan, Katherine Tian, Laura Wu and Katherine Zhang, grade 11; and Amy Dunphy, Swapnil Garg and Amy Jin, grade 12.
These 10 students are among the 491 semifinalists nationwide chosen from more than 1,860 projects submitted. Each of the semifinalists’ projects will be evaluated to determine which students will be named regional finalists, who in November will enter into six regional competitions. Winners from the regional finals events are eligible to attend in the National Finals, held at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C., where finalists will compete for $500,000 in scholarships.
The finalists announcement is set to take place tomorrow. Stay tuned!
Last week, Nidhya Shivakumar, grade 7, was named one of the top 300 students nationwide from the 2,499 middle school students nominated for this year’s Broadcom MASTERS science competition. Her project, titled “Halophytes: A Potential Solution for the Remediation of Soil in Saline Wastelands,” was selected by a panel of science and engineering professionals, who evaluated projects based on originality, creativity, analysis of data and other criteria.
If named one the 30 national finalists, Shivakumar will receive an all-expense-paid trip to Washington, D.C., for the final stage of the competition in October, where more than $100,000 in awards will be distributed. Best of luck!
Two Harker students won awards at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, held last week in Los Angeles.
Junior Amy Jin’s project, titled “Deep Learning-Based Automated Tool Detection and Analysis of Surgical Videos to Assess Operative Skill,” won her a Second Award in the robotics and intelligent machines category. She also won a First Geno Award, which included a $1,000 cash prize, from the Samvid Education Foundation.
Recent graduate Manan Shah ’17 won a Second Award in the computational biology and bioinformatics category for his project, titled “Deep Learning Assessment of Tumor Proliferation in Histopathological Images for Categorical and Molecular Breast Cancer Severity Diagnosis.” The project also earned him an honorable mention from the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence.
Both students won their trips to Intel ISEF at the Synopsys Science & Technology Championship in March, where they each received grand prizes.
On Feb. 11, Harker’s Science Bowl team won the regional competition held at the Stanford Linear Accelerator’s National Accelerator Laboratory. Senior Venkat Sankar and juniors Rajiv Movva, Shaya Zarkesh, Swapnil Garg and Derek Yen now move on to the national competition, to be held in Washington, D.C., April 27-May 1. Yen filled in for Arjun Subramaniam, grade 12, who could not compete due to a family obligation. Per the rules of the National Science Bowl, Yen will be part of the team that competes at nationals.
Organized by the U.S. Department of Energy since 1991, the National Science Bowl has teams of students compete against one another in a Q&A format similar to television game shows. Questions deal with a variety of topics, including biology, physics and math.
Nice articles from the Mercury News and Stanford on the win!
Harker’s team of physicists took third place overall at the United States Invitational Young Physicists Tournament, held late last month at Philadelphia’s University of the Sciences. The team – comprising senior Manan Shah, juniors Neelesh Ramachandran and Selin Sayiner, and sophomores Ayush Pancholy and Ashwin Rammohan – earned 70.5 points to tie for third place, trailing just 1.5 points behind the second place finisher.
Important to the team’s success in Philadelphia was the work done by the research team of juniors Joanna Lin and Justin Xie and sophomores Nishant Ravi and Kaushik Shivakumar. These students spent many hours after school performing research and running experiments that provided valuable information to the team that represented Harker at the tournament.
The Young Physicists Tournament is held in a round-robin format and has schools debate solutions to various problems. Teams are evaluated based on the quality of their theoretical solutions, experimental evidence and answers during Q&A portions.
Seniors Evani Radiya-Dixit, Arjun Subramaniam and Manan Shah were selected as three of the 40 national finalists in this year’s Regeneron Science Talent Search, the Society for Science & the Public announced this morning. These three finalists represent the most from any school in the country, and are among three of five finalists hailing from the Bay Area. This number also ties the Harker record of three finalists set in 2015.
The students will be headed to Washington, D.C., in March for the final competition, where $1.8 million in prizes will be up for contention. During their visit, they will have the opportunity to meet with national leadership and present their work to the National Geographic Society.
—-
Nine Harker students were among the 300 scholars named today in the 2017 Regeneron Science Talent Search (formerly the Intel Science Talent Search). Seniors Kai Ang, Angela Kim, Sandip Nirmel, Srivatsav Pyda (not pictured), Evani Radiya-Dixit, Venkat Sankar, Manan Shah, Scott Song and Arjun Subramaniam made up the largest group of scholars from a single California high school and tied with New York’s Jericho High School and Maryland’s Montgomery Blair High School for the largest number from a single school in the nation.
Each student will receive a $2,000 cash prize, and an additional $2,000 will be awarded to Harker as one of the schools that produced this year’s STS scholars.
On Jan. 24, the Society for Science & the Public will announce this year’s 40 STS finalists, who will travel to Washington, D.C., in March to compete for $1.8 million in prizes.
Cynthia Chen, grade 9, earned the second place prize in the Broadcom MASTERS Competition in the science division! She will receive a $2,500 award for her efforts. Nice article in the Mercury: http://www.mercurynews.com/2016/11/05/school-scene-students-win-science-honors/. Congratulations Cynthia!
Update: Another great article on Chen’s project! https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/blog/eureka-lab/teen-develops-water-saving-pods-seeds
UPDATE: Oct. 7, 2016
The Los Altos Town Crier recently published a story about the project that earned freshmen Aarzu Gupta and Maya Shukla semifinalist recognition in this year’s Broadcom MASTERS competition.
——
UPDATE: Sept. 23, 2016
Earlier this week, Cynthia Chen, now grade 9, was named one of 30 national finalists in this year’s Broadcom MASTERS competition. The second finalist in Harker’s history, Chen has received a $500 cash prize and will head to Washington, D.C. in late October for the to compete for $100,000 in awards.
Chen’s project aimed to alleviate the problems caused by California’s ongoing drought by creating a capsule that housed seeds surrounded by water crystals, allowing them to grow with just a third of the water usage.
Good luck to Cynthia this October!
——
Last week, the Society for Science & the Public announced that Harker freshmen Cynthia Chen, Aarzu Gupta and Maya Shukla were among 300 students nationwide named semifinalists in this year’s Broadcom MASTERS competition. Chen, Gupta and Shukla entered the competition last year while in eight grade. A total of 2,434 applicants entered this year’s competition.
The Broadcom MASTERS (Math, Applied Science, Technology and Engineering Rising Stars) competition highlights the work of middle school scientists from across the country. The top 10 percent of middle school participants at society-affiliated science fairs are nominated to participate, and must then submit an application to enter the competition. Each application is rigorously reviewed by professionals in science, engineering and education.
Finalists are scheduled to be announced next week. Stay tuned!