Each year, students across the United States apply to be named National Merit Scholars, which often times comes with a nice scholarship.
Southern Denton County was well-represented among 16,000 semifinalists, which were announced Wednesday.
The following local students are one step closer to gaining the title of National Merit Scholar.
Argyle ISD
- Nuojuan Jin
- Saathvik Pakhala
Denton ISD
Ryan High School
- Rebecca M. Serna
- William H. Taylor
Lewisville ISD
Flower Mound High School
- Eklavya Agrawal
- Luke S. Carter
- Shiven S. Diwakar
- Joel M. Han
- Ethan D. Hjelm
- Audrey S. Hong
- Haider A. Kazmi
- Advik Kishore
- Aanya S. Krishnakumar
- Landon D. Luttenegger
- Sivan Manikandan
- Akshath S. Manne
- Lauren E. Miller
- Meer P. Parekh
- Irene S. Park
- Marsela Polotska
- Mihika Rajeev
- Nihal Rajesh
- Anvitha Rayala
- Rijoy Sarkar
- Adhitya Sundar
- Meghna Umesh
- Amogh M. Vinaykumar
- Kaviya Vinoth Kumar
Hebron High School:
- Sania A. Abraham
- Maryam A. Aziz
- Kevin Bino George
- Christian L. George
- Elodie L. Hamm
- Reese Johnson
- Kornel Kalman
- Kason J. Kilgore
- Ethan Kim
- Gavin A. McCain
- Siyona J. Mehta
- Vedanth Mukkamalla
- Shaan S. Reddy
- Joshua W. Tsimberg
Marcus High School
- Joshua M. Ashman
- Anjali Bose
- Cheyenne N. Davila-Juarez
- Anoushka A. Kolatkar
- Anslin M. Sibin
Private/Homeschool/Academies
- Sean D. Crabtree of Flower Mound, Coram Dao Academy
- Tanmay Vasudeva of Lewisville, Texas Virtual Academy of Hallsville
Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science at UNT
- Aishwarya Anand
- Rishit Anand
- Anush Bindlish
- Gurtaj Boparai
- Wendy Chen
- Gregory Daley
- Kaushik Duddala
- Fay Gao
- Ava Gu
- Avin Gupta
- Claire Hood
- Adeline Huang
- Elizabeth Jiang
- Amelia Johnston
- Siddharth Kakumanu
- Ansh Kapadia
- Shreyas Karumudi
- Sriprajnav Koduri
- Yuen Hei Jamie Law
- Larry Lee
- Eireen Liao
- Chloe Lu
- Jessica Luo
- Sai Serena Metta
- Isabelle Mueller
- Aayush Pal
- Rohan Pandey
- Sravya Pilla
- Pranay Pottipati
- Varun Puttagunta
- Nithyashri Ramesh
- Aman Roy
- Aryan Shah
- Viraj Shrivastava
- Nihitha Valagonda
- Nikhil Verma
- Samuel Wu
- Jeffrey Xu
More than 15,000 of the semifinalists are expected to move on to the finalist level, and will be announced in February. According to the National Merit Scholarship Corporation, 6,700 scholarships worth $24 million will be awarded in Spring 2027.
The road to a 2027 National Merit Scholarship started when 1.2 million juniors from 20,000 high schools entered the program by taking the 2025 Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test, which served as an initial screen of program entrants.
The nationwide pool of semifinalists represents less than one percent of U.S. high school seniors.
According to NMSC, three types of scholarships will be offered in the spring of 2027. Each finalist will compete for one of 2,500 scholarships worth $2,500, which will be awarded on a state-representational basis.
About 700 corporate-sponsored Merit Scholarship awards will be provided by approximately 120 corporations and business organizations for finalists who meet their specified criteria.
In addition, about 140 colleges and universities are expected to finance some 3,500 college-sponsored Merit Scholarship awards for finalists who will attend the sponsor institution.
The scholarship winners for 2027 will be announced from April through July.
A good number of students from southern Denton County earned scholarships from NMSC in 2026.
