Middle and Upper School Students Enjoy Successful Weekend at 2015 Synopsys Championship

Harker students had another successful year at the 2015 Synopsys Silicon Valley & Technology Championship, held in March at the San Jose Convention Center.

Three upper school contestants won grand prizes, earning them trips to the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. Juniors Jonathan Ma and Sadhika Malladi each won a grand prize in the Biological Sciences category, while Nitya Mani, grade 12, was a grand prize winner in Physical Sciences. Vedaad Shakib, grade 10, was named a grand prize alternate in Physical Sciences. Malladi and Mani also received $250 each from the Whitney Foundation, and Mani received a certificate of achievement from Mu Alpha Theta.

Upper school students were most successful in the RRI Biological Sciences category. In addition to the awards won by Ma and Malladi, Rahul Jayaraman, grade 12, won a first award. Vineet Kosaraju, grade 11, Madhuri Nori, grade 12, and Amrita Singh, grade 10, won second awards, while sophomore Venkat Sankar earned an honorable mention. Nori also received a second place award and $175 cash prize from the American Association for Laboratory Animal Science.

In RRI Physical Sciences, senior Vamsi Gadiraju earned a first award, a $100 first prize from Morgan Lewis and an honorable mention from the Society of Vacuum Coaters. Fellow senior Leo Yu also received several honors, including an honorable mention student award from the Association for Computing Machinery, a certificate from Arizona State University’s Walton Sustainability Solutions Initiatives, a certificate of achievement from Mu Alpha Theta and a certificate of achievement from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Amy Dunphy, grade 9, received an honorable mention and a high school finalist certificate from the Synopsys Outreach Foundation. Another honorable mention went to Evani Radiya-Dixit, grade 10.

Sophomore Rishab Gargeya won a second award in Bioinformatics. He was one of six award winners in the category, with grade 9 students Jerry Chen, Anastasiya Grebin, Amy Jin and Anooshree Sengupta all earning honorable mentions and Justin Xie, also grade 9, receiving a certificate of achievement from Mu Alpha Theta.

Trisha Dwivedi and Kshithija Mulam, both grade 10, each won honorable mentions in Botany. In Engineering, freshman Rajiv Movva and sophomore Arjun Subramaniam both earned first awards, with Subramaniam also winning a trip to the headquarters of cloud services provider Firebase to work on his application programming interface (API).

Manan Shah, grade 10, received a first award in Computers/Mathematics, in which Vedaad Shakib won a second award and a certificate of achievement and medallion from the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps. Sneha Bhetanabhotla, grade 10, received an honorable mention in the physics category.

In the Behavioral/Social category, junior Mary Najibi was awarded a certificate of achievement from the American Psychological Association. Sophomore Neymika Jain earned a second award in Medicine/Health/Gerontology and a certificate from ASU’s Walton Sustainability Solutions Initiatives.

Several Harker grade 8 students also had success at Synopsys. In Zoology, Nishka Ayyar and Srija Gadiraju both won honorable mentions, as did Ashli Jain and Sonal Muthal in the Chemistry category. Krish Kapadia and Anjay Saklecha both won first awards in Medicine/Health/Gerontology, and also received nominations to compete in this year’s Broadcom MASTERS competition.

In Behavioral/Social, Shafieen Ibrahim and Keval Shah won first awards and Broadcom MASTERS nominations. Meanwhile, Kaushik Shivakumar received a certification of achievement and medallion from the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps for his project in Physics, and Cindy Wang received an honorable mention in Engineering.

Finally, Alexander Young won a first award in Biochemistry/Microbiology and received a nomination to compete in Broadcom MASTERS.