WVCSD Superintendent Spotlight: Evan Grundfast

Warwick Valley High School senior Evan Grundfast was recently honored as a semifinalist in the 70th annual National Merit Scholarship Program. He is also the first student of the school year to be recognized as part the disrtict’s Superintendent Sportlight series. According to the school district, he was surprised after being called to Principal Georgianna Diopoulos’s office on September 6 where he received the news and a letter from the program.

The National Merit Scholarship Corporation (NMSC) honors the nation’s scholastic champions and encourages the pursuit of academic excellence. The nationwide pool of 16,000 semifinalists includes the highest-scoring entrants from each state, and represents less than 1% of U.S. high school seniors.

Grundfast said that he wasn’t confident he would become a semifinalist, but he felt the honor was a culmination of his work and achievements in school. Grundfast plans to attend college next year, majoring in pre-med and minoring in business. His top school choices are University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Brown University, and Cornell University.

“Evan is an incredible student, academically,” said Principal Georgianna Diopoulos. “I met him in the fifth grade (as principal of Warwick Valley Middle School) and he has just grown. As he’s gotten older, he’s just gotten more and more intelligent.”

A yearly participant in the district’s annual STEAM fair, Diopoulos remembered his project from sixth grade.

Grundfast was awarded first place for his investigation “Testing the Strength of Nylon 6,10.” Inspired by Spider-Man and the strength of his web, Grundfast tested weight holding capacities of Nylon 6,10 to see whether the material would be sufficient in supporting a large amount of weight for building infrastructure.

“It was reminiscent of Spider-Man’s silk, and I was like, well, a lot of times they say that spider webs have a higher tensile strength than steel wire of the same thickness,” Grundfast said. “I was like maybe if it’s similar, it would have similar properties. And then I found out when it gets that it had stronger properties. So, it might be used in industrial applications like wires for a bridge.”

Grundfast is president of the Henry C. Lamoreaux Warwick Chapter of the National Honor Society this school year, and he is focused on helping the organization be successful with fundraising and setting goals.

“I feel like I’m more financially oriented, so I want to have a lot of successful fundraisers. I know that we already have like $2,000 or so in in our account. So, I’d like to raise that by hopefully a couple more thousand. When I was president of National Junior Honor Society [eighth grade], we had, I think, raised like $10,000.”

Grundfast said NJHS had donated to medical frontline workers that year because of the COVID pandemic as well as to the Warwick Valley Humane Society.

He would like to help the community again this year.

“I’d like to repeat at least some of that with NHS because now we have more people, we have more numbers,” he said. “So hopefully we can do more fundraising.”

In addition to participating in the WVHS Science Research Program and being a member of the school’s Model U.N. and the Gaming Club, Grundfast is part of the Warwick Valley team that competes in the Orange County Academic League (OCAL) tournament.

Grundfast is also a returning member of the boys’ tennis team. This year will mark his third year as a team captain. He’s played first team singles and first team doubles. He made the JV team as a seventh-grader and has been on varsity since eighth grade.