Mira Loma HS Students Recognized by State Assembly

By Brian O’Hara, press secretary, Office of Assemblymember Richard Pan, D-Natomas.

Mira Loma High School is grabbing national attention for the outstanding achievements its students are making.

Dr. Richard Pan, Assemblymember for the Mira Loma and Carmichael areas, invited the students recently to the State Capitol to officially recognize their hard work.

Senior has spent the last four years organizing annual shipments of more than 14,000 textbooks to students in Liberia. Robbins will be honored in September when the Casey Robbins International School opens in Liberia’s capital city of Monrovia.

“Mira Loma has helped me explore literature and I wanted to give students in Liberia the same opportunity,” Robbins said. “Liberians and Americans share history and the English language, so it’s a perfect fit.”

Selena Li has completed research that could offer an alternative to chemotherapy and transplants for liver cancer patients. Her work and finding are expected to be
published this summer in a scientific journal. Li recently also recently placed fifth
in the National Intel Science Talent Search.

“It’s an exciting time for me to be conducting research because science and medicine are growing by leaps and bounds,” said Li. “I love contributing to and
being part of the larger scientific community and having a doctor and researcher
as my Assemblymember is great.”

Students from Mira Loma High School also recently won the United States Department of Energy’s in Washington D.C. The winning
team was made up of students Russell Islam, Siddarth Threhan, Andrew Chen,
Anish Khare and Sriram Pendyala. Their coach, James Hill, discussed their success.

“The fact that these kids came home winners is the icing on the cake; these kids have worked so hard to train themselves as scientists and are going to give so much back to society,” said Hill. “Their work shows what we can do when parents and teachers support young people and those young people work hard to succeed.”