Glenbrook South Alum Wins National Merit Scholarship

GLENVIEW, IL — A recent Glenbrook South High School graduate earned one of the final National Merit scholarships to be awarded this year, the National Merit Scholarship Corporation announced Monday.

Amil Vinayak Dravid won a college-sponsored scholarship to Northwestern University, which has 7,300 undergraduates on its Evanston campus. He has a probable career field in computer science, according to National Merit.

Earlier this year, Cambridge University Press' journal Microscopy Today published a research paper Dravid authored. "Employing Deep Networks for Image Processing on Small Research Datasets" where he demonstrated a way to teach computers to identify the nucleus of a cell using machine learning and transmission electron microscopy images.

College-sponsored scholarships awarded by the organization provide between $500 and $2,500 annually for up to four years of undergraduate study at the sponsoring institution.

About 4,100 such National Merit scholarships are awarded from 173 colleges and universities, including 78 private schools and 78 public ones in 43 states and Washington, D.C., according to the nonprofit.

Winners are selected from among about 15,000 National Merit finalists by school officials from each sponsoring college or university.

Established in 1955, the National Merit Scholarship Corporation is an Evanston-based nonprofit that receives most of the funding for its scholarships from about 400 college and corporate sponsors.

Monday's announcement of more than 540 winners of college-sponsored scholarships is the final group of National Merit Scholars to be named in 2019. It brings the total number of winners to over 7,600, who will receive more than $31 million in scholarships.

National Merit last fall named 12 members of Glenbrook South High School's class of 2019 as semifinalists in the program. Earlier this year, the nonprofit awarded college-sponsored scholarships to four GBS seniors bound for Northwestern, Harvey Mudd College and the University of Chicago and $2,500 scholarships from its own funds to three others.

Earlier:

• 4 Glenbrook South Students Awarded College-Sponsored Scholarships
• Three Glenbrook South Students Win National Merit Scholarships
• 12 Glenbrook South Students Named National Merit Semifinalists