Ossining Senior Receives National Merit Scholarship

Ossining High School Class of 2019 valedictorian Emma Montgomery is one of more than 3,500 seniors who will receive National Merit Scholarships financed by colleges and universities in the United States, the organization announced today.

Officials at each sponsor college selected their winners from the finalists in the 64th annual National Merit Scholarship Program who plan to attend their institution. They will receive annual awards of between $500 and $2,000 for up to four years. Emma will attend the University of Chicago.

Emma was one of 40 finalists nationwide for the Regeneron Science Talent Search earlier this year. In her research, she used CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) base editing, a revolutionary genetic editing tool that can repair or model DNA mutations. The mutation of a single pair of nucleotides in DNA can cause cancer and other diseases.

One of the major challenges in gene editing is that current base editors have low efficiency rates. Emma’s research significantly improved efficiency rates by altering the DNA sequence of the base editing construct and developing a novel method for assessing the efficiency of different guide RNA sequences. She re-engineered the original base editing enzyme and developed two new base-editing constructs with higher editing efficiencies.

The National Merit Scholarship Corp. will announce another group of scholars in July, bringing the total number of college-sponsored scholarship recipients to about 4,100. About 175 colleges and universities are underwriting awards this year.

Earlier this spring, the National Merit Scholarship Corp. announced winners of corporate-sponsored Merit Scholarship awards and National Merit Scholarships of $2,500.

Between the corporate- and college-sponsored awards and the $2,500 scholarships, about 6,500 seniors will receive over $31 million for college.

More than 1.6 million juniors at about 22,000 high schools entered the National Merit Scholarship Program when they took the 2017 Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test. The National Merit Scholarship Corp. announced approximately 16,000 semifinalists last fall. They represented the highest-scoring test-takers in each state. About 15,000 met the requirements for finalist standing.

Four OHS seniors received letters of commendation from the National Merit Scholarship Corp. last September. The organization recognized Aidan Case, Kellen Cooks, Caleb Feinstein and Nina Foster for their outstanding academic promise. About 34,000 of the roughly 50,000 high scorers on the PSAT received letters of commendation.