Local students from Issaquah, Sammamish and other regional schools were recently named National Merit Scholarship semifinalists in recognition for outstanding academic achievement.

The local National Merit semifinalists are among approximately 16,000 high school seniors nationwide who qualified. About 15,000 semifinalists are expected to advance to the finalist level to compete for 7,500 National Merit Scholarships, worth approximately $33 million in total, that will be offered in the spring of 2017.

About 1.5 million students qualified for National Merit Scholarship awards by completing the 2015 Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test. The semifinalists include the highest-scoring students in each state and represent less than one percent of U.S. high school seniors.

Eastlake High School: Melissa Birchfield, Samantha Moynihan

Eastside Catholic: Andrew Charters, Alexandra Galiotto, Samuel Glaze, Paul Riddle

International Community School: Kartik Iyer (Sammamish)

Issaquah High School: Sidney Chan, Aashika Jhawar, Christopher Park, Romil Sirohi, Sophie Wang, Spencer Young, Christopher Yuen

Liberty High School: Amanda Elmore, Nicole Leung, Evan McLean

Redmond High School: Vishal Baskar (Sammamish), Sophia Chang (Sammamish), Falak Daud (Sammamish)

Skyline High School: Ishaan Bhimani, Alex Camai, David Cao, Jennifer DeJong, Austin Dodd, Paari Gopal, Kunal Gupta, Sidney Hershey, Adil Islam, Christina Nguyen, Ishira Parikh, Gayathri Raj, Kaley Romero, Beverly Shih, Jared Stever, Clara Too, Eugene Tou, Kevin Zhu

Tesla STEM High School: Varsha Veeramachaneni (Sammamish)