This past weekend, a team of eight Harker students took second place at the 2018 United States Invitational Young Physicists Tournament (USIYPT) in Lynchburg, Va. According to upper school physics teacher Mark Brada, the team – made up of senior Neelesh Ramachandran; juniors Timothy Chang, Ashwin Rammohan, Kaushik Shivakumar and Nemo Yang; sophomores Finn Frankis and Sahil Gosain; and freshman Saloni Shah – spent the past year preparing for the tournament with help from fellow students Ayush Pancholy, Nishant Ravi and Akshay Ravoor, all grade 11. Together, the students worked to solve a set of four problems for the USIYPT.

“The competition was particularly strong this year as the tournament has reached its largest size ever, featuring 15 teams in total from the United States, China and Tunisia,” Brada said. The tournament received coverage from The News & Advance, Lynchburg’s daily local newspaper.