Two Hundred Twelve Students Named 2021 National Merit Semifinalists

By
FCPS News
September 09, 2020

Two hundred twelve students from 18 high schools have been named semifinalists by the National Merit Scholarship Corporation for 2021. Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJHSST), which also serves as the Governor’s Regional School for Northern Virginia, has 132 semifinalists.

All semifinalists are eligible to compete for 7,600 National Merit Scholarship awards worth more than $30 million, to be awarded in spring 2021.

Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) 2021 National Merit semifinalists are: 

  • Centreville High School:  Arnav Chandra, Allison Lee, and Ethan Welch.
  • Chantilly High School: Janice Guo, Dylan Threadgill, and Haoyu Wu.
  • Fairfax High School:  Bennett Brabrand, Samuel Littman, and Matthew Shin.
  • Falls Church High School: John Child.
  • Lake Braddock Secondary School: Colin McGee, Rylee Montague, and Cameron Wells.
  • Langley High School:  Selena Akay, Justin Bahr, Ishan Dogra, Otto Janke, Joshua Jones, Victoria Li, Mikael Nguyen, Michael Pang, Alisha Qian, David Song, Christina Wang, Jasmine Wang, and Seohyun Yoon.
  • Madison High School:  John Conroy, Krutika Joshi, Christina Luckett, Julia Obeirne, Deepa Rao, Emily Rothrock, Gwen Setia, Alina Williams, and Rayan Yu.
  • Marshall High School:  Rohan Bajpai, William Fernau, Kaia Griggs, Evan Hellersund, Samuel Langborgh, and Connor Sandall.
  • McLean High School:  Camille Blakemore, Ryan Chou, Kelly Dematties, Abria Hamberg, Amelia Hsu, Hyohyun Jung, Kathryn Kim, John Lannin, Lily Neusaenger, Sophie Shobeiri, and Hannah Tsai.
  • Oakton High School: Cheryl Bai, Ranya Fischer, Ceasare Garrone, Zhiqin He, Haley Longfellow, Nora Mutarelli, Cecilia Schmitz, Carson Shin, Daivik Siddhi, Allison Silas, Dhruv Sundararaman, and Jerry Wei.
  • Robinson Secondary School: Mrinal Bhatnagar and Andrew Lichtblau.
  • South County High School: Anna Patel.
  • South Lakes High School: Kyle Minihan, Trisha Rahman, and Evan Xu.
  • Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJHSST): Jaatani Abdi, Reevu Adakroy, Nedah Ahmad, Ethan Ai, Lucy Alejandro, Alby Alex, Haytham Alsayed, Kamal Amirneni, Roja Ayyadurai, Maxwell Bai, Subhiksha Balaji, Dhanush Banka, Molly Barron, Anais Beauvais, Aakanksha Bharadwaj, Darika Bisht, Khushmeet Chandi, Aadith Charugundla, Jason Cheah, Andrew R. Chen, Andy G. Chen, Emma Cheng, Aryan Chinnala, Justin Choi, Anna Chung, Margaret Clarke, Peter Costescu, Raunak Daga, Frances Dai, Alexander Davis, Bharath Dileep Kumar, Tammy Ding, Derek Dong, Joel Eldo, Rubaiya Emran, Eden Ethington, Sophia Evanisko, Shanti Fewell, Daniel Fu, Mitali Gandhe, Vyomika Gandhi, Amber Garcha, Patrick Gilles, Catherine Granum, Vihini Gunasekera, Meera Gupta, Richik Haldar, Aidan Harbison, Nathan Harbison, Andy He, Daniel Healy, Kristen Heller, Stephen Huan, Joshua Huang, Aaliya Hussain, Akila Islam, Anisha Jain, Saahith Janapati, Tiffany Ji, Nathaniel Joachim, Riya Jones, Anuraag Kaashyap, Julia Kao-Sowa, Senna Keesing, Lauren Keffer, Eric Kim, Aditi Kodali, Aditvenkat Kolli, Vance Kreider, John Lee, Joshua Lian, Joshua Lovejoy, Quentin Lovejoy, Thomas Lu, Victoria Lu, Olivia Ma, Tristan Ma, Vagul Mahadevan, Praneeth Malyala, Kelly Mao, Natalie Martin, Qingyu Meng, Pranav Mishra, Yullee Moon, Timothy Mooney, Charles Muldoon, Udbhav Muthakana, Kari Naga, Ganesh Nanduru, Lauren Nathan, Ethan Nguyen, Whitman Ochiai, Abhinav Palicherla, Adit Pareek, Daniel Park, Somasekhar Patil, John Pendergrass, Katherine Phan, Marian Qian, Abhirama Rachabattuni, Sahiti Rachakonda, Vikram Raghu, Anand Ramaka, Sahana Ramesh, Avik Rao, Ronith Reddy, Emerson Rodriguez, Connie Ryu, Siddharth Shah, Avani Sharma, Austin Shi, Shivam Singh, Lilia Smith, Seungwan Son, Neha Sripathi, Alexander Suh, Nathan Suh, Alexander Talamonti,  Aaishi Uppuluri, Teja Valluri, Nishitha Vattikonda, Varun Vejalla, Eamon Weingold, Maxwell White, Charles Wu, David Xiang, Miranda Xiong, Jason Xu, Julia Yang, James Ye, Daniel Zeng, and Alex Zhang.
  • West Potomac High School: Lauren Koelsch.
  • West Springfield High School: Daniel Agrawal, Dilare Aizezi, Josh Ilachinski, and Miles Saunders.
  • Westfield High School:  Samyutha Belde and Eun Choe.
  • Woodson High School: Margaret Berberian, Alexandra Cooper, and Benjamin Neifeld.

Approximately 16,000 high school seniors were named National Merit Scholarship semifinalists for 2021. More than 1.5 million juniors entered the 2021 National Merit program by taking the 2019 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. These determinations are made by the National Merit Scholarship Corporation, not FCPS or individual schools.

Three types of Merit Scholarship awards will be offered in 2021: National Merit $2,500 scholarships, corporate-sponsored scholarships, and college-sponsored scholarships.

Merit Scholarship winners will be announced in spring 2021.
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Note: For more information, contact the FCPS Office of Communication and Community Relations at 571-423-1200.