This Wednesday, 121 MVLA and PAUSD seniors from the Class of 2026 advanced as semifinalists in the National Merit Scholarship Program. The semifinalists include 41 students from Gunn High School, 23 from Los Altos High School, 17 from Mountain View High School and 40 from Palo Alto High School.
Every year, this scholarship selects around 16,000 students as semifinalists. Recognition of the academic performance of these seniors is based on their scores in the Preliminary Scholastic Aptitude Test last October. The next step of the process — competing to become finalists — involves an application with academic records, community participation details, awards, a letter of recommendation and SAT or ACT scores, to name a few.
Ultimately, finalists will compete for $2500 from the National Merit Scholarship Corporation and merit-based scholarship awards offered by other academic institutions. Scholarships will be announced in spring 2026.
The MVLA semifinalists are:
Mountain View High School:
- Ivanka Abrol
- Soveen A. Agarwal
- Sadie D. Bankhead
- Jason Y. Chien
- Rohan Gadde
- Ruihang Gu
- Katelyn Hu
- Jacob Jiang
- Sophia E. Lew
- Jane S. Liou
- Emily M. Markova
- Camryn W. Nguyen
- Ryan H. Panzer
- Eleanor Y. Shin
- Ivan K. Tse
- Kavya Wazhi
- Wilder A. White
Los Altos High School:
- Joshua Chai
- Aiden Chavda
- Sophia Chen
- Zoe Cheng
- Manya Dhingra
- Jonathan Du
- Linuki Ekenayake
- Caila Kim
- Roshan Mahesh
- Ishika Modi
- Dylan Po
- Jayalakshmi Raffill
- Avni Rajagopal
- Vedanth Rajan
- Aarushi Shukla
- Sofia Sims
- Will Starkey
- Blake Thompson
- Albus Xiao
- Fiona Yao
- Sophie Yung
- Henry Zaks
- David Zeng
The PAUSD finalists are:
Henry M. Gunn High School:
- Jenna M. Ahmed
- Margaret Beery
- Angelise Chang
- Emerson C. Chang,
- Jianan Chen
- Kaylee Cheng
- Jacob C. Chiu
- Nithya Desikan
- Neil Dixit
- Jonathan Sujay Dorai
- Danny Gu
- Bani U. Gupta
- Peter Jiang
- Ziqi Jin
- Doyoon Kim
- John R. Kochenderfer
- Aakash Koneru
- Annika E. Kulawik
- Sevin Kwon
- Aidan Lee
- Eric Li
- Jinjia Liu
- Kabir S. Mahajan
- Michael C. Matta
- Noam Morris
- Aidan Peng
- Thomas Scheib
- Brandon Seow
- Tienming Shao
- Grace Sun
- Jaanvi Tadipatri
- Arav Tambar
- Kaavya Tatavarty
- Colby T. Wang
- Chloe Y. Wu
- Kayla Xu
- Ya-An Xue
- Benjamin Yang
- Nadia Yilmaz
- Joey H. Young
- Victor Zhu
Palo Alto High School:
- Akio Altekar-Okazaki
- Marcello A. Attardi
- Isabella H. Bian
- Talia C. Boneh
- Maya C. Caren
- Yara Chaib
- Annika Y. Chu
- Tomasz P. Czajkowski
- Jeffrey Y. Fan
- Michelle Fang
- Kiana S. Gerritsen
- Brendan Giang
- Khai M. Gordon
- Wentian He
- Nathan P. Hunt
- Yuna Jeong
- Arjun Jindal
- Milo Johnson
- Elsa V. Lagerblad
- Audrey N. Li
- Gavin A. Lin
- Bethany Liu
- Brian Liu
- Nathan A. Mourrain
- Kaiden H. Mu
- Oliver K. Payne
- Ashwin Rajan
- Paisley K. Robles
- Finnegan Schoebel
- Diana G. Senderzon
- Zoey A. Simpson
- Juli E. Spreckelmeyer
- Amalia K. Tormala
- Audrey Wang
- Matthew Wei
- David J. Wu
- Kiara S. Yoon
- Jeremy S. Yuen
- Ethan Zhang
Lillian Zhao
Read last year’s article on the class of 2025’s semifinalists here.
