On July 2, Horace Greeley High School senior Merry Sun found out that she had been named a Davidson Fellow. "Davidson Fellows scholarships recognize young people under the age of 18 for completing a significant piece of work that has the potential to make a contribution to society...." Along with 19 other scholarship winners who have "found ways to nurture their genius…," there is a reception being held this week in Washington, DC honoring recipients, and Sun said should would attend.

Ms. Sun won the award, which includes a $25,000 scholarship, for her project "Fighting Cancer with Sound: Activation of an Immune Response Against Tumor Cells Using Therapeutic Ultrasound." Merry's research was done under the guidance of her mentor Dr. Chandan Guha, a family friend and radiation oncologist at Montefiore Medical Center/Albert Einstein College of Medicine, who was working with therapeutic ultrasound when Merry went to the lab "to get experience." The bulk of Merry's work was done during the summer following her sophomore year.

In Merry's words, her project "explores the effects of therapeutic ultrasound on tumor cells." According to the young researcher - Merry skipped kindergarten and first grade and is therefore a 16 year old senior – therapeutic ultrasound is sound pressure that is "heated to around 40 degrees Celsius." The project concluded that therapeutic ultrasound brought on "endoplasmic reticulum and unfolded protein responses that caused immune system stimulation." In less scientific terms, the specific type of ultrasound physically damaged tumors and, in doing so, kicked the body's healing system into action.

Merry's chosen study topic - cancer - is personal. Around when Merry started her research, "two of [her] aunts were diagnosed with lung and thyroid cancer….Then, a cousin was diagnosed with lymphoma." Merry also got involved in research because of her family; Merry's father is a professor at The Mount Sinai Medical Center, her mother is a doctor, and her older sister Irene was a 2003 Davidson Fellow for her work in science.

At Horace Greeley, Merry says that she has "great science teachers." Naomi Cook has been "Merry's research teacher for the last three years" and, in Merry's words, "supports [her] completely."

Cook said that "[Merry is] an outstanding student of science" who "possesses a natural love for the subject and genuinely enjoys the research in which she engages."

Although, according to Merry, it is "very probable" that she will go into science or medicine as a profession – she's thinking Yale or Columbia for college – science is not her only interest. Merry has been playing piano for 11 years and recently performed in Carnegie Hall. Reading is another one of Merry's passions. Her father remembers that "Merry has always loved reading." Growing up, "she always had a few books on her at a time" and "at around four or five, she was already reading chapter books." Merry's favorite books are Gone with the Wind and The Bell Jar.

Merry is obviously not the typical high school senior. But, she has never been typical. "Merry is a very independent girl, very smart," her father said. As a young child, she quickly grew "bored with movies like Snow White," but was always invigorated at the library. Accompanying her father to his lab, she examine microscopic cells and asked questions about how things form, why thing happen, and where things come from. At around 7 years old, Merry joined a class made up of the area's top one percent of students and performed well in the challenging environment. Dr. Sun said, as a youngster, Merry "had a lot of curiosity."

Although more focused, concentrated, and determined than most from the start, Sun still shows glimpses of typical teen behavior. Waiting to hear if she did or did not win the scholarship, Merry was "basically going crazy." Then, when she arrived home to find a package from the Davidson Institute two weeks before she expected it, Merry "had a fit on the doorstep!" Thinking ahead to her trip to DC, Sun is "really excited to meet all of the other Davidson Fellows." In typical teenage fashion, Merry is also looking forward to meet a rumored celebrity guest; not-so-typically, the celebrity news that has her excited is that she heard that "Harry Reid is going to be there!"