You can add “National Merit Scholarship winner” to the ever-expanding dossier of San Marino’s Louise Deser Siskel.
Deser Siskel—the 2019 Rose Queen—last week was one of 2,500 Merit Scholar designees selected from a pool of 15,000 finalists to receive a $2,500 scholarship. This year’s National Merit Scholarship program began in October 2017 when more than 1.6 million juniors at approximately 22,000 high schools took the preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship qualifying test, which served as an initial screen of program entrants.
Deser Siskel, a senior at Pasadena’s Sequoyah High School, is heading to the University of Chicago, where she will study cellular and molecular biology. Louise, the 101st Rose Queen, in is the daughter of Charlie Siskel and Abigail Deser; she has a brother, Simon.
At Sequoyah, Louise was a member of the Debate Team and the Judicial Committee and also participated in the YMCA Youth and Government program. Research projects she conducted in space biology have been funded by the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, and she also conducted breast cancer research at Charles Drew University in Los Angeles. The possible field of study on her National Merit Scholar application was listed as “Medicine.”
