By Alexander Dworkowitz
Nicholas Pantaleo always knew he wanted to be a doctor.
Now Secretary of State Colin Powell knows it, too.
Pantaleo, an 18-year-old resident of Whitestone, was presented with the Maud and Luther Powell America’s Promise Scholarship at City College Oct. 15.
Pantaleo, a freshman at the Sophie Davis School of Biomedical Education at City College in Manhattan, will receive free tuition from the school for the next four years in pursuit of a degree in medicine.
Powell and his sister, Marilyn P. Berns, launched the scholarship at City College, which is Powell’s alma mater, in 1999 in honor of their parents.
“I wrote [Colin Powell] a thank you letter,” said Pantaleo. “He sent me a letter back. I’ll keep in contact with him hopefully for the rest of my life.”
Pantaleo graduated from Saint Francis Preparatory School in Fresh Meadows in the spring. He was accepted to the Sophie Davis School in April, applied for the scholarship in June and was told he had won in July.
The Sophie Davis School’s program instructs undergraduates for five years at which point students go on to medical school for two years. Pantaleo expects to have a degree in medicine by the age of 24.
Pantaleo has no fears about spending the next seven years studying medicine.
“I’ve always been around it; it’s always been something I wanted to do,” he said, speaking of his father who works as a pharmacist at Jamaica Hospital. “When I was 5, my dad would bring home models of the heart, and I would be really interested in them.”
Pantaleo said that he became sure that he wanted to be a doctor in the third grade.
“I was really sick. I was at the doctors’ a month straight with chicken pox and arthritis. Just from the way they treated me, I knew I wanted to be a doctor.”
In high school, Pantaleo was actively involved in both his school newspaper and speech. But his greatest passions were medical research and community service.
“I was trying to find out how garlic gets into prostate cancer cells,” said Pantaleo. He worked with Dr. John Pinto at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, researching which transport system garlic uses to get into prostate cancer cells. Garlic has been proven to help reduce the reproduction rate of cancer cells.
As far as volunteer work, Pantaleo helped out at PS 4 in Fresh Meadows as both a peer tutor, making himself available to students as a friend and role model.
“Over there it was mostly children who had family problems. We would go through their work, helping them. It was like a big brother, big sister thing.”
“Nicholas is a very impressive young man,” said Roman Stanford, dean of the Sophie Davis School. “He’s done a lot of different things, both community service as well as his activities in school. He’s been recommended to us as a superb human being.”
Pantaleo lives at home with his parents, Nicholas and Josephine, and his younger brothers, Joseph, 16, and Luke, 14. He also has a 19-year-old sister, Kathryn, who attends Queens College. With a daily commute of over an hour, Pantaleo is considering moving to Manhattan his sophomore year.
Reach Reporter Alexander Dworkowitz by e-mail at Timesledger@aol.com or call 229-0300, Ext. 141.
