Meet Long Beach’s Next Top Scientist: Samantha Feingold | Herald Community Newspapers

Samantha Feingold is only 17, but she has made a huge impact at Long Beach High School. She has been involved in clubs, plays multiple instruments, raised money for various causes, and as a recent International Baccalaureate graduate, she will be attending Yale in the fall.

As if that wasn’t enough, Feingold received a Claes Nobel Future Female Leader Scholarship from the National Society of High School Scholars. This scholarship recognizes young women who are leaders in their schools and serve as mentors to girls who follow in their footsteps. To be considered, Feingold had to submit an application with letters of recommendation and write an essay about the leadership roles she has taken on at school.

“I talked about a webinar I did this summer on 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 freshman year because I want to go to medical school in college and I plan on majoring in neuroscience.”

As an intern, Feingold assisted hospital staff with tasks such as creating patient admission records in the ambulatory surgery unit and She answered calls to the maternity ward. She also did an internship at Hagedorn Little Village School in Seaford. These experiences inspired her to create an online think tank.

“It’s a specialty school, and they also deal with neurological conditions,” she said of Hagedorn, “which is part of why I want to major in neuroscience and go to college.”

Her think tank, Fight the Phobia (available at FightThePhobia.com), offers potential solutions to the public health problem of “personal medical neglect,” which results from “phobias” of hospitals. She talks about nosocomephobia, which is the fear of hospitals.

“In healthcare, there is a problem of personal medical negligence, because many people are afraid to go to the hospital,” Feingold says. “They would rather forgo medical treatment than go to the hospital, which they are afraid to go to. So my think tank basically discussed the causes of hospital phobias and came up with possible solutions for how doctors can make hospitals more patient-friendly.”

Feingold’s interest in science and the medical field grew at a young age. She would watch TLC shows like “Botched” and “Dr. Pimple Popper.” Her father and grandmother are psychologists, and seeing them help others fueled her interest in health care.

That led her to earn an IB diploma, the most advanced diploma available at Long Beach High. She took IB classes like psychology and biology, the latter of which immersed her in college-level science. Feingold also admired her biology teacher, Robyn Tornabene.

“She was my IB biology teacher my freshman year,” she said. “She was extremely smart. I also had her for science research for a year, and I learned a lot from her.”

Feingold isn’t just interested in a career in health care. She wants to help people in other ways, which she’s been doing for some time. She’s raised money 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 future neuroscience major, she wants to empower high school students in New Haven, Connecticut, Yale’s hometown, to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics through Yale’s Ventures in Science outreach program.

“They have a program that teaches science to high school students and gets them interested in science,” Feingold said. “I don’t want to be a teacher when I grow up, but I enjoy teaching others and helping them. So that’s something I’d like to do as a community service in the future.”