Russ-Ahna Davenport is a 17-year-old senior at Merion Mercy Academy. While journalism is new to her, she is never bored. A participant in a myriad of school clubs that range from Juan Ying club to stage crew, Russ-Ahna is the founder of ZenZone, a mindfulness and positivity club that aims to help students deal with stress and learn how to be better people.

Her main academic focuses are bioengineering and environmental science. Russ-Ahna is a member of her school’s Biotech club, in which the participants discuss bioethics, or the ethics of biological research. Russ-Ahna hopes to go into environmental science at Columbia University and to study how the environment affects our lives.

Another one of her major interests is art: Russ-Ahna has been drawing “forever,” and is in Art Majors 3 Honors, the highest-level art class in her high school. She took classes at Moore College of Art and Design and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and is mainly interested in the fine arts, such as painting and sketching. Her works are very emotional and are both realistic and imaginative, and the viewer can easily relate to her works, making them that much more powerful. 

Russ-Ahna found a love of environmental science when she went on a service trip to Guatemala for 12 days. She lived with a host family and helped them, and what she found most astounding was that no matter how little the people she lived with had, they were always willing to share. This trip inspired her to study environmental science as well as bioengineering, and she hopes to make an impact on her community and the world.