Meet Long Beach’s next top scientist: Samantha Feingold

Samantha Feingold is only 17, but she has made quite an impact at Long Beach High School. She has been involved in clubs, plays several instruments, has raised funds for a variety of causes and, as a newly minted graduate with an International Baccalaureate Diploma, will attend Yale in the fall.

As if that weren’t enough, Feingold was awarded a Claes Nobel Future Female Leader Scholarship by the National Society of High School Scholars. The scholarship recognizes young women who are leaders in their schools and mentors for girls following in their footsteps. To be considered, Feingold had to apply with letters of recommendation, and write an essay about leadership roles she took on in school.

“I talked about this webinar that I hosted over the summer about the relationship between social media and how it affects the brain,” she said. “I also talked about my internship at Mount Sinai South Nassau Hospital that I did my junior year, because I want to go pre-med in college, and I’m planning on majoring in neuroscience.”

As an intern, Feingold assisted the hospital staff with tasks like creating patient admitting packets in the Ambulatory Surgical Unit, and answering calls in the Maternity Department. She also interned at the Hagedorn Little Village School in Seaford. These inspired her to create an online think tank.

“It’s a special-needs school, and they deal with neurological afflictions as well,” she said of Hagedorn, “which is part of why I want to major in neuroscience and college.”

Her think tank, Fight the Phobia — found at FightThePhobia.com — offers potential solutions to the public health issue of “personal medical negligence,” which has resulted from hospital “phobias.” She discusses nosocomephobia, which is the fear of hospitals.

“In health care, there was a current issue with personal medical negligence, because there are many people who are afraid to go into hospitals,” Feingold explained. “They would rather forgo medical treatment instead of going into the hospital, where they’re afraid to go. So my think tank basically talked about the causes of hospital-related phobias, and proposed possible solutions about how doctors can make hospitals more friendly environments.”

Feingold’s interest in science and the medical field sprouted when she was young. She used to watch shows on TLC like “Botched” and “Dr. Pimple Popper.” And her father and grandmother are psychologists, and watching them help others fed her interest in health care.

That led her to complete an IB Diploma, the most advanced diploma available at Long Beach High. She took classes such as IB psychology and biology, the latter immersing her in college-level science. Feingold also admired her biology teacher, Robyn Tornabene.

“She was my IB biology teacher for year one,” she said. “She was just extremely intelligent. I actually had her for science research one year also, and I just learned so much from her.”

Feingold isn’t exclusively interested in a career in health care. She wants to help people in other ways, which she has done for some time. She raised funds for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, and was co-captain of the Long Beach School District’s Sea the Cure team, leading a team of more than 20 students in raising money to help fight blood cancers.

“This year we did really well,” she said. “We raised over $20,000.”

At Yale, she plans to continue her volunteer efforts and activism in student organizations. As a prospective neuroscience major, she wants to empower high school students in New Haven, Connecticut, Yale’s home city, to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and math through Yale’s Ventures in Science outreach program. 

“They have this program where you basically teach high school students about science and get them interested in science,” Feingold said. “I don’t want to be a professor when I grow up, but I enjoy teaching others, and helping others. So, that’s something I would like to do for community service in the future.”