Ossining High School Senior is National Merit Finalist

Ossining High School senior Adriana Scanteianu has been selected as a finalist in the National Merit Scholarship competition.

The National Merit Scholarship Corp. notified the roughly 15,000 finalists this month. They will compete for about 7,400 scholarship awards worth $33 million.

Adriana was one of roughly 16,000 high school seniors nationwide who qualified last fall as semifinalists in the 62nd annual scholarship competition because of high scores on the Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test. Some 1.6 million juniors took the 2015 PSAT, and about 1 percent became semifinalists.

Adriana has been recognized in recent months for her achievements as a student in the OHS Fundamentals of Science Research Program. She was one of three students in the program to be chosen as a semifinalist in the 2017 Regeneron Science Talent Search. She conducted proteomics research at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She studied large biological datasets and found a way to predict protein concentrations.

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 early February and qualified to present her research at the Upstate New York Junior Science and Humanities Symposium next month.

Adriana is also involved in sports and extracurricular activities in Ossining. A competitive swimmer for about a dozen years, Adriana is co-captain of the girls varsity swim team. She is president of the school’s math club and is involved in other groups. She plays piano and clarinet.

School counselor Marybeth Griffin has described Adriana as academically talented, humble and hard-working. Students, teachers and administrators who know her “are impressed with her heart as well as her brain,” Ms. Griffin said.