As the bell signaling the start of office hours chimes, students flood out of buildings and congregate in clusters with their friends, taking a break from academics to give each other updates on their day. At the same time, a small but spirited group heads to Nichols room 325, gearing up for a discussion on a groundbreaking research development or hotly debated ethical concern. Students file into the research laboratory where Aaron Tran (12), who founded Journal Club, awaits.

Aaron’s journey with science research began in his freshman year. He attended science classes like any student, but his insatiable intellectual curiosity differentiated him from others. Upper school biology teacher Mike Pistacchi observed this desire to learn and praised Aaron for his valuable contributions to the class.

“He’s got a great sense of curiosity,” Pistacchi said. “He wants to know everything about everything and asks a lot of great questions. He genuinely thinks about the material. He thinks about the topics and how they work and asks questions that help him better understand how they work.”

Aaron took the questions he’d been left with from his biology class to Research Methods in his sophomore year, where he was able to delve into related literature and create a project out of them.

“Apart from the technical skills, one of the main things I took away from research was the fact that you could take a question you had and run with it,” Aaron said. “For my sophomore to junior year project, I took a question I had from biology class and thought, ‘What if I read a paper about it? What if I pursued it more?’ The fact that I was able to do that was revelatory to me.”

In upper school science teacher Chris Spenner’s Research Methods course, Aaron was also exposed to the concept behind Journal Club: a group of students reads a research paper, and one student leads a discussion on the contents of the paper. During these discussions, Spenner noted the level of thought Aaron put into each comment he made, comments that ultimately provoked a deeper, more fruitful conversation.

“My first impression of him was during a Journal Club discussion in sophomore year, and he was already thinking deeply and philosophically about a lot of science issues, which he kept doing,” Spenner said. “Since then, he’s grown in his efforts to reach out to other people and spread his ideas and gather other people’s ideas.”

Enthralled by these classwide discussions, Aaron wanted to expand this idea to involve students interested in research but not enrolled in the course. In the fall of 2020, he partnered with Research Club to bring Journal Club to all students, regardless of skill level or prior research experience.

“It’s fortunate that now that I’m in my second semester [of senior year], I get to go back and work on it more,” Aaron said. “Journal Club, or at least the concept of it, has always been important to me because that’s how I got introduced to science.”

In addition to introducing Aaron to science, Journal Club has taught him a valuable set of skills, which have proven incredibly useful to traditional research. These skills include the ability to glean important information from dense scientific literature and review cutting-edge research practices.

“Journal Club demonstrated to me that science is not just a collection of facts or a body of knowledge; it’s more like a language or a community that you need to engage with,” Aaron said. “Being able to read papers about the actual advancements being made in a field and learning how to think critically, and then gaining new perspectives from the different papers I read, was something that always meant a lot to me. Hopefully, [I’ll have] more opportunities to expand access to that for everyone.”

While Aaron enjoys reading literature written by others, he also finds value in writing for himself, whether related to science or not. He contributes to publications such as student-run science journal Harker Horizon and harXiv, an archive of prior Harker project materials, but takes time to journal about other aspects of his life as well.

“[When I write], I try to reflect on the kind of person I want to be,” Aaron said. “I don’t think it’s often that you get a moment to articulate exactly what you see in yourself or what you want to do better, so that’s what I write about. But it’s also not just about me. It’s more about taking these small observations [and] these little inconsistencies and things I observe about the world and asking, ‘What does that say about me? What does that say about my assumptions?’”

When the pandemic hit during his junior year, Aaron found himself with much more time on his hands than normal, which he used for reading and reflection. During that time, large amounts of both science and pseudoscience were presented to the public, causing Aaron to feel lost and disoriented despite his background in biology.

Among other effects, the pandemic and its accompanying mask mandate increased political polarization. Aaron took this opportunity to reflect on and understand perspectives from both ends of the spectrum, especially the anti-science viewpoint. After organizing his own thoughts, Aaron then prepared a TEDx talk for Harker’s annual TEDxHarkerSchool on the topic to help those around him draw similar conclusions.

“In the TEDx talk, I argue that we trust people who have authority to decide what is truth and what is not,” Aaron said. “That’s a very useful thing because we can’t know everything under the sun, but at the same time, the reality is we leave a lot of power to these people. Instead of dismissing pseudoscience outright, we have to also be humble and recognize that pseudoscience comes from a genuine skepticism that is rooted in the reality of how we actually come to know things.”