Record Number of FCPS Students Named 2016 National Merit Semifinalists

Two hundred thirty-seven Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) students from 19 high schools have been named semifinalists by the National Merit Scholarship Corporation (NMSC) for 2016, an all-time high for FCPS. Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJHSST), which also serves as the Governor’s Regional School for Northern Virginia, has 163 semifinalists.

All semifinalists are eligible to compete for 7,400 National Merit Scholarship awards worth $32 million, to be awarded in spring 2016.

FCPS 2016 National Merit semifinalists are:

Annandale High School: Rebecca Soulen. Centreville High School: Emily Angelotti and Grace Chung. Chantilly High School: Andrew Kim and Alice Wang. Fairfax High School: Junghun Koh and Gahyun Shim. Falls Church High School: Sandra Kendall. Herndon High School: Matthew Kim, Jessica Nielsen, Justin Spiegel, and Olivia Strahan. Lake Braddock Secondary School: Divya Menon, Alyssa Rucker, James Smith, Kathy Tao, and Liam Twomey. Langley High School: Shanell Fan, Yasmin Khodaei, Tyler Larkworthy, Nikhil Sakhamuri, Jing Wang, and Lyric Wu. Madison High School: William Carter, Emily Cheng, Joyce Cheng, Michael Giovanniello, Casey Grage, Terri Hahn, John Han, Annie Khuu, Liam Murphy, Nazar Ostapenko, Katrina White, and Kevin Woolsey. Marshall High School: John Balch and Emma Fan. McLean High School: Nicholas Anthony, Jatin Dasgupta, Iris Gou, Abraham Haji, Kathryn Howley, Adam Katwan, Sam Kim, Andrew Ko, Grace Lee, Gulenay Saydahmat, Matthew Steelberg, Catherina Suh, Gillian Wright, Kun Xing, Jin Yong Yoo, and Liam Zeya. Oakton High School: Rachel Carlton, Wilson He, Gregory Lee, Sarah Meng, Nikhil Prasad, Grace Yu, and Zhiguang Zheng. Robinson Secondary School: Geeta Ahuja. South County High School: Jinny Lee, James Wang, and Peter Wang. South Lakes High School: Aarti Bhandari and Taylor Rauch. Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology: Hasan Ahmad, Marcus Alder, Millen Anand, Juliana Bain, Devon Barbour, Milan Bharadwaj, Shreya Bhatia, Maaike Blindenbach, Bradford Case, Abhimanyu Chadha, Haarika Chalasani, Alex Chang, Arvind Chava, Kenneth Chen, Allen Cheng, Saroj Chintakrindi, Jane Choi, Jake Cui, Deboshree Das, Stephen Dempsey, Ankit Deshmukh, Megan Do, Claire Dong, Venkata Doodala, Ana Driscoll, Joyce Duan, Perry Feng, Donald Frank, Giancarlo Frix, Aaron Geldert, Kiran Girish, Anthara Gnanakumar, Joel Goetz, Ryan Golant, Han Gu, Pranav Gulati, Matthew Guo, Dhruv Gupta, Shrey Gupta, Richard Hage, Alison Hau, Aaron Ho, Christopher Hoang, Alexander Hoganson, Chloe How, Samuel Hsiang, Andrew Huang, Grace Huang, Gabriela Huckabee, Junyoung Hwang, Catherine Im, Chantal Iosso, Deepak Jayachandran, Joslyn Jung, Tarun Kamath, Deborah Kang, Tai Kao-Sowa, Joseph Karaki, Sweta Karlekar, Rajat Khanna, Dong Gyu Kim, Hyo Won Kim, Jeewoo Kim, Jia Kim, Samuel Kim, Se Hyun Kim, Suyon Kim, Yeonju Kim, Sruthi Kodali, Nikki Kothari, Wade Kovalik, Akshat Kumar, Min Jae Kwon, Ava Lakmazaheri, Jason Lam, Keaton Lee, Seungha Lee, Alison Li, Chelsea Li, Rachel Li, Eli Lifland, Kevin Lin, Rebecca Linick, Jeffrey Liu, Jiazhen Liu, Ray Liu, Jerry Lu, Alison Luckett, Yinglun Ma, Sahith Malyala, Shreya Mandava, Olivia Marcantonio, Gabriel Margolis, Sophia Martinese, Katherine McLaughlan, Daniel Medas, Austin Mills, Evelyn Mo, Al Mochida, Christopher Morris, Hrishikesh Nair, Jessica Nguyen, Thuy-Vi Nguyen, Jared Nirenberg, Joo Young Ok, Christopher Oliveira, James Pan, Rohan Pandit, James Park, Robin Park, Maitri Patel, Sayan Paul, Felipe Pazos, Abbigail Peterson, Katherine Pruitt, Lisa Qian, Bijal Rajput, Nikhil Ramachandran, Raghav Ramraj, Claudia Richoux, Charles Ruiter, Clarissa Scoggins, Ravi Shankar, Nirmaan Shanker, Andrew Shi, Kunal Shroff, Anika Sindhwani, Kritika Singh, Emilio Sison, An Smith, Johnson Song, Emily Sun, Matthew Sun, Virginia Sun, Ananya Suri, Aneesh Susarla, Anant Tewari, Julian Vallyeason, Kaushik Venkatesh, Akhil Waghmare, Shuxian Wang, Wendy Wang, Sara Warrington, Jason Wei, Kathryn Wen, Phoebe Whitmore, Bernice Wu, Kevin Xu, Hitesh Yalamanchili, Stella Yang, Victoria Yang, Rohan Yaradi, Michael You, Michael Yue, Shirley Zhan, Alec Zhang, Olivia Zhang, Tiger Zhang, William Zhang, Andrew Zhao, David Zhao, Jonathan Zheng, and Jenny Zhu. West Springfield High School: Arjun Gupta. Westfield High School: Stephanie Introne and Ishwarya Sivakumar. Woodson High School: Gordon Armstrong, Samuel Richmond, Chaeyoon Shim, Christopher Suh, and Samantha Terry.

Approximately 16,000 high school seniors were named National Merit Scholarship semifinalists for 2016. More than 1.5 million juniors entered the 2016 National Merit program by taking the 2014 Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test (PSAT/NMSQT®), which serves as the initial screen of program entrants. The nationwide pool of semifinalists, which represents less than one percent of U.S. high school seniors, includes the highest scoring entrants in each state. The number of semifinalists in a state is proportional to the state’s percentage of the national total of graduating seniors.

Three types of Merit Scholarship awards will be offered in 2016: National Merit $2,500 scholarships, corporate-sponsored scholarships, and college-sponsored scholarships.

Merit Scholarship winners will be announced in spring 2016.

Note: For more information, contact the FCPS Office of Communication and Community Relations at 571-423-1200.