Samantha Stuart is a high school senior from Collingwood, Ontario. She is currently wrapping up her secondary school career in Neuchatel, Switzerland, juggling intensive academics, intensive travel, and directing a play for her drama class to perform. Long time science fair enthusiast and two-time Canada-Wide-Science-Fair winner, Samantha’s areas of academic interests include everything from Calculus, to Classical Music, to Cosmology, to the Social Sciences. At the 2012 CWSF her Bronze medal-winning project worked to uncover a connection between different psychogenic human needs and social media use. Her conclusions from this project, along with a plea for help from a visiting PhD student (he was unable to complete his thesis due to overuse of Facebook), sprung her forward to investigate addiction in the following year. Samantha worked alongside the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, Ontario to develop and statistically validate a novel psychometric scale. The scale’s purpose is to measure the intensity of one’s human needs (as demonstrated though their Facebook use) with respect to their level of Facebook usage. After the scale’s completion and statistical validation, it was converted into an interactive web application, which is available for public use at the shortened URL http://goo.gl/gyxte. At the 2013 CWSF, Samantha won a Senior Gold Medal, the Actuarial Foundation of Canada Award, the Statistical Society of Canada Award, and a Manning Innovation Achievement Award, along with five University Entrance scholarships. In her spare time, Samantha can be found travelling, reading, playing the flute or singing classically. She has obtained both her Grade 8 Flute and Voice with the Royal Conservatory of Music, and plans to eventually pursue Performance ARCTs in both. In her year abroad, Samantha also had the opportunity to win a Gold Medal for Oral Interpretation of Literature at the New European Speech, Debate, and Acting Association competition in Munich, Germany, participate in NEVSKY, a Model UN in St. Petersburg, and to help construct a house in Hungary alongside a team of volunteers with Habitat for Humanity. Recently, Samantha has been selected out of more than 6,000 applicants as one of the University of Toronto’s 10 “National Scholars;” a merit scholarship which relieves all tuition, residence, and incidental fees at the University for her undergraduate education. Consequently, Samantha will be studying Materials Engineering at U of T in the fall while living at Trinity College, with further aspirations to pursue research, industry, and international relations.
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