Sept. 1, 2015
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News A5
Visual Arts teacher wins award By Lara Mikhail and Ayanna Frey
PRINTED WITH PERMISSION OF MIAE CHON
Korean American Parents Association hosts annual barbecue
DANCING QUEENS: Sarah Wagner ’19, Angela Chon ’16, Nicole Kim ’18, Jenny Yoon ’19 (left to right) and Caitlin Chung ’20 perform a traditional Korean drum dance at the Korean American Parents Association’s annual barbecue Aug. 23 for parents, students, faculty and staff. The event also featured student musicians and a video of the faculty summer trip to South Korea.
Website ranks teachers number one in nation By Layla Moghavem
Rankings on Niche.com placed teachers at Harvard-Westlake at number one among U.S. private schools for 2015. Niche.com, created by Carnegie-Mellon students in 2002, provides reviews of elementary schools, middle schools, high
schools and colleges in the United States. The ranking is based on surveys from parents, students and alumni, the student-to-faculty ratio, average student SAT and ACT scores and the percentage of students who matriculate to four-year colleges. The school’s overall score was the highest out of
945 U.S. private high schools. Although faculty members are pleased by the recognition, Upper School Dean Vanna Cairns said such rankings often “simplify a very complex process” by putting more weight on statistics than student feedback. “What our teachers do every hour of every day in every
classroom is extraordinary and commendable,” Cairns said. “Yet that factor is not quantifiable. Or as much as it can be quantifiable, it is given only 10 percent of the equation here.” Niche.com also placed Harvard-Westlake’s academics as the third best nationally after Castilleja School and The Harker School.
Teacher recognized for dedication to community By Andrew Ahn
Math teacher Beverly Feulner was presented with the Carolyn and Marion Hays Award at a joint faculty meeting on Aug 25. The award is given to a Harvard-Westlake staff member who provides long-term service to the school and influences the
community in positive ways. Head of School Jeanne Huybrechts commended Feulner for contributing far more than what was required and for working for over 32 years at both the Harvard School for Boys and Harvard-Westlake. She started teaching math at Harvard in 1983. The award was created by
Harvard School alumni Thomas and Louis Hays in honor of their parents. Marion Hays was an assistant headmaster, teacher and dorm head at Harvard School from 1944 to 1970, and his wife Carolyn was also active at the school. Feulner said she was shocked when her name was
called and she discovered she won. “It was a complete surprise to me,” Feulner said. “There are a lot of people who do a lot for the school, and to even be considered was a huge honor.” Feulner teaches math courses including Math Analysis Honors, AP Calculus and Algebra II Honors.
Medina received the Kogan Family Award for Innovation in Teaching from Head of School Jeanne Huybrechts at the opening faculty meeting on August 25. Medina has been working as the primary photography teacher at the Middle School and is beginning to teach at the Upper School starting this year. Established in 2010 by Betsy and Mark Kogan (Ben ’11, Eli ’13), the award is given to a teacher who uses original approaches to improving the teaching process. For the past three years, Medina has initiated multiple photography projects throughout the Los Angeles area. Projects such as “In/Other Los Angeles,” “Sense of Place” and ‘#WhereAmI’ strive to connect a community of students through their photography. His projects have been recognized by major photography blogs such as the Los Angeles Times Lens Blog and the New York Times Lens Blog. Joining the upper school visual arts team, Medina is coming to teach two classes of Darkroom Photography while continuing to teach photography at the Middle School. “I am really looking forward to collaborating and working with Upper School Visual Arts Faculty and students. I am also looking forward to following the progression of visual arts students making the transition from the middle to upper school,” Medina said. Medina will be starting every day at the upper school and by 5th period will be teaching classes at the middle school. “A change in environment throughout the day will be nice as well .I don’t really see any challenges [by teaching at the Upper School and Middle School] other than the commute,” Medina said.
Juniors, seniors conduct stem cell, cancer research at USC summer internship By Jonah Ullendorff Eight juniors and seniors interned at a Stem Cell Research Laboratory at the University of Southern California this summer studying cancer cells and cutting open mice brains. Students spent the first week of the program in a lab learning basic cell culture techniques like pipetting, aspirating media and feeding and cultivating cells. After this, students were assigned to individual labs where they assisted graduate students with their research. The students who attended the program were Sylvia Sanders ’17, Emerson Harris ’17, Sharon Chow ’16, Jonathan Seymour ’16, Jonah Goldman ’16, Hannah Kelson ’16, Roy Dritley ’16 and Alex Kihiczak ’16. “I did the job because it’s
so awesome,” Sanders said. “I have always wanted to perform research on cancer, and the fact that I was able to start that dream at such a young age was absolutely amazing. I didn’t think twice about accepting, and I’m so glad I did. It was everything I had wanted and more. It was truly a life-altering experience.” Chow signed up for the program due to her interest in learning more about research and stem cells. She was assigned to work in Dr. Michael Bonaguidi’s lab, which focused on neurogenesis, the creation of new stem cells in the brain. “We’re working on two main projects, and the one I am part of is the aging study,” Chow said. “What we do in this project is study the effect of aging on neural stem cells or radial glia-like cells (RGLs) and their fate choice. We harvest the [mouse] brains, cut them and stain them with
flourescent antibodies with a sparse-labeling technique so the cells show up under an epiflourescent microscope. We then take pictures of the cells with a confocal microscope that takes two to three micron thick photo slices so we can make a 3-D rendering of it.” After participating in the program during the summer, Chow has considered research as a vocation for when she is older. Chow was taken by surprise that her work required live lab mice that needed to be harvested for her research. “Personally, I cut and stained a lot of brains over those past eight weeks, which I never expected to do,” Chow said. Sanders, Goldman and Seymour worked in the Stem Cell Core Facility, a lab in the Eli and Edythe Broad CIRM Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research
PRINTED WITH PERMISSION OF JONATHAN SEYMOUR
SPLIT DECISION: Jonathan Seymour ’16 feeds cancer cells and separates them into petri dishes where they will grow. He was one of eight students who conducted stem cell research at USC. at USC. Seymour assisted a graduate student whose research was to determine the function of a specific protein found in cancer stem cells. As a result, Seymour was working with varying types of live cancer cells for his internship. Although Seymour said he can’t see himself becoming a
doctor in the future, he is interested in doing research in later on. “I had no idea what I would be doing until I stepped into the lab on the first day,” Seymour said. “In a million years, I would never have seen myself working with cancer, so that was shocking when I learned that that was what I would be doing.”