Ossining High School Senior is National Merit Scholarship Semifinalist

Ossining High School senior Adriana Scanteianu is a swimmer, Science Research Program student, admitted “math nerd,” a musician and as of this week, a National Merit Scholarship Program semifinalist.

Adriana, 17, is one of about 16,000 students nationwide who has qualified as a semifinalist in the 62nd annual scholarship competition because of high scores on the Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test (PSAT). Those who advance to finalist status in February will vie for about 7,400 Merit Scholarship awards worth $33 million.

School counselor Marybeth Griffin described Adriana as academically gifted, hard-working, humble, helpful and multi-talented.

“Adriana sticks out even among the brightest of the bright,” Ms. Griffin said. “I’m so proud of her. Everybody who has ever encountered her, whether it’s a student, teacher or administrator, is impressed with her heart as well as her brain.”

Adriana has been a competitive swimmer for about a dozen years and is co-captain of the Ossining girls varsity swim team.

“The girls on the swim team are really great. They’re really supportive of one another and everyone’s in each other’s corner,” said Adriana, who also ran spring track from her freshman year through 11th grade.

Adriana is president of the school’s math club and has been a member of the engineering club. She is also involved in other groups and plays piano and clarinet.

Her project for the Fundamentals of Science Research program is in bioinformatics. She is studying large biological datasets and has found a way to predict protein concentrations. She performs her research at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

“Basically because of our research we’re able to predict how much of specific proteins a cell will make and that’s really important because you can guess what a cell will do if you know how much of each protein it makes,” she said.

Adriana said she likes the teachers she has had in Ossining because “they love to throw problems at you in math and physics class,” for example, and let students figure them out on their own or by working in small groups.

“It sort of fostered this excitement about math and science that I don’t see anywhere else,” she said.

Adriana is looking at colleges in New York and the Boston area and may pursue a career in bioinformatics research or teaching. She has a 20-year-old brother who studies at Stony Brook University, part of the State University of New York. Her parents moved to the United States from Romania in the early 1990s.

Some 1.6 million juniors from across the country took the 2015 PSAT. About 1 percent of high school seniors become semifinalists, and roughly 90 percent of those students will be selected as finalists.