Accomplished Ossining High Senior Selected as National Merit Scholar

Ossining High School senior Adriana Scanteianu is in the first group of winners in the 62nd annual National Merit Scholarship Program.

She is one of 40 distinguished high school seniors in New York and more than 1,000 nationwide who learned last week they have won corporate-sponsored National Merit Scholarship awards financed by about 200 corporations, company foundations and business organizations.

Adriana received the National Merit CBS Corp. Scholarship. Corporate sponsors provide the scholarships for finalists who are children of their employees, residents of communities the company serves or who plan to pursue college majors or careers the corporations wish to encourage.

“I am very honored to have received this award, and I think it speaks for the quality of Ossining schools and the high caliber of teachers and programs at Ossining High School more than anything,” she said.

The National Merit Scholarship Corp. is awarding about 7,500 scholarships worth more than $32 million this spring and early summer. Adriana was one of roughly 16,000 students nationwide who qualified last fall as semifinalists because of high scores on the 2015 Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test. Only about 1 percent of some 1.6 million juniors who took the PSAT became semifinalists. In February, she was selected as one of about 15,000 finalists.

Adriana is an exceptional student, skilled athlete and talented musician, school counselor Marybeth Griffin said. She is also intelligent, kind, creative and funny, Ms. Griffin added.

“I could go on for days stating many examples of what makes her a great student and community member,” she said. “Suffice it to say she is one of the brightest and most humble young women that I have had the pleasure to know. I am sure that we will be hearing great things from her in the future.”

Adriana said she likely will be attending the Honors College at Rutgers University in New Jersey and studying for a degree in mathematics. She is not sure at this time whether she wants to pursue a career in research, industry or education.

She is in OHS’ prestigious Science Research Program and has received a number of awards for her research in proteomics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She studied large biological datasets and found a way to predict protein concentrations.

Adriana was one of three students in the program who were chosen as semifinalists in the 2017 Regeneron Science Talent Search. She was one of 15 student finalists nationwide for the 2017 Neuroscience Research Prize, which is sponsored by the American Academy of Neurology and the Child Neurology Society.

Adriana was also a first-place winner in the Westchester Rockland Subregional Junior Science and Humanities Symposium in February and qualified to present her original research at the Upstate New York Junior Science and Humanities Symposium. She received a third-place award in the molecular and cellular biology category at the Upstate JSHS competition.

Other school and extracurricular activities Adriana is involved in include swimming, engineering club and math club. She was co-captain of the Ossining girls varsity swim team this year and is president of the math club. She plays piano and clarinet.